Gother Practical Advice To Teachers

PRACTICAL ADVICE TO TEACHERS
[II]
F O U N D AT I O N S O F WA L D O R F E D U C AT I O N
RUDOLF STEINER
Practical Advice
to Teachers
Anthroposophic Press
The publisher wishes to acknowledge the inspiration
and support of Connie and Robert Dulaney
❖ ❖ ❖
These lectures, from shorthand reports unrevised by the lecturer, are translated
by Johanna Collis from the German Erziehungskunst. Methodisch-Didaktisches
(vol. no. 294 in the Bibliographical Survey) published by Rudolf Steiner Verlag,
Dornach, Switzerland. The lectures have been edited by Anthroposophic Press
for this edition.
Copyright © 2000 Anthroposophic Press

Introduction Copyright © 2000 Astrid Schmitt-Stegmann
Published by Anthroposophic Press

PO Box 799, Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.anthropress.org
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steiner, Rudolf, 1861–1925.
[Erziehungskunst. English]
Practical advice to teachers / Rudolf Steiner; [translated by Johanna Collis].
p. cm.— (Foundations of Waldorf education ; 2)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-88010-467-8 (paper)
1. Teaching. 2. Waldorf method of education. 3. Educational psychology.
I. Series.
LB1025.3 .S735 2000
00-020597
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

in any form without the written permission of the publishers, except for brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Foreword by Astrid Schmitt-Stegmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Lecture 1. August 21, 1919

introduction; artistic activity, arithmetic, reading
and writing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
sympathy and antipathy expressed by speech;
the oneness of humankind with the cosmos;
nuances of spoken sounds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
sculptural and pictorial arts, music, and poetry;
teaching what children do not yet understand;
nature study in and out of the classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
the first lesson; manual skill, drawing and painting;
distinguishing beauty; beginning to teach language;
ancient power of speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
writing and reading; consonants and vowels; spelling . . . 62
experimental psychology and reading; life’s rhythms
and rhythmic repetition in teaching; the teacher’s
position outside ordinary life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
the ninth-year teacher; natural history, cuttlefish,
mouse, people and their arms and hands; Schiller’s
Aesthetic Letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
education after twelfth-year—history and physics;
teachers must cultivate wonder in themselves . . . . . . . . 106
the economy of teaching; language lessons . . . . . . . . . 118
Lecture 10. September 1, 1919
arranging lessons until the fourteenth year; introducing
history and geography; foreign languages continued:
observing life; geometry and object lessons . . . . . . . . . 130
teaching geography as the basis for all subjects. . . . . . . 143
how to relate education to everyday life;
religious sentimentality does not lead to idealism;
relating one subject to another. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
the curriculum; the consequence of too much
intellectuality; general sequence of the curriculum;
making the best of external regulations . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
practicing moral principles in education;
using the child’s healthy instincts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Foreword
Before the opening of the first Waldorf school, Rudolf

Steiner met with the group of teachers who were preparing
themselves for their new task. For fourteen days, from August
20 to September 5, 1919, he gave these teachers a foundation
for an understanding of the growing human being in body,
soul, and spirit. This understanding made it possible for the
teachers to call forth the true artists in themselves, enabling
them to create their lessons out of imaginative and inspired
thought pictures.
Rudolf Steiner began the day with the lectures that are col-
lected in The Foundations of Human Experience (previously
titled The Study of Man); then he followed these with the prac-
tical advice contained in the lectures of this book. The sessions
which are known under the title Discussions with Teachers fol-
lowed in the afternoons. Together these three books constitute
the solid foundation upon which every Waldorf teacher can
build, for, as we hear at the beginning of the first lecture of this
book, Waldorf teaching methods will have to differ from other
methods. They will draw on the teacher’s spiritual-scientific
understanding of the child and of the time in which they live.
In Practical Advice to Teachers, he spoke to the teachers in
the following way: “Concern yourselves with whatever has
genuine significance for the child’s development (lecture 4,
p.55). Then he proceeded to give invaluable insights into the
methodology that no Waldorf teacher can be without. These
lectures not only provide insight into how certain subject mat-
ter works in the growing child and how it correlates with his or
viii PRACTICAL ADVICE TO TEACHERS
her developmental stages, but also how teachers in their method

of working can “bring the Soul-Spirit into harmony with the
Life-Body,” (The Foundations of Human Experience, lecture 1)
and how they can handle the subjects “for the purpose of devel-
oping human capacities” (Practical Advice, lecture 1).
This book contains so many gems and profound insights
into how to address the needs of the growing human being in a
healthy way that it is positively astonishing. For that reason
these lectures can be an inspiration to parents, home schoolers,
and all others who are interested in human development and
education.
The harmonizing of the growing human being is an urgent
need in our time, now that the technological revolution has
propelled humanity into an information age that brings with it
a hectic pace of life accompanied by stress and an over-empha-
sis on intellectual pursuits. Artistic expression as well as other
aspects of education that nourish the soul and spirit are
neglected and ignored. Our children and teenagers are strug-
gling to find meaningful experiences where they feel met as
human beings searching for answers to their earthly existence.
The excitement and constant flow of entertainment that the
technological innovations supply hold many captive. However,
entertainment does not address the need for inner fulfillment
that the human individual seeks in order to find his or her
place and purpose in this present incarnation.
In Practical Advice for Teachers, Rudolf Steiner focuses on
just that: giving much practical advice and insight into meth-
odology. He gives a clear picture that the curriculum does not
include art for art’s sake. Instead, every subject is to be taught
artistically so as to engage the whole child and draw forth the
students’ own creative essential being as well as their interest in
the world. We recognize the mission of the arts rightly if, in
addition to the above, we see them also as strengthening the
Foreword ix
motivational will forces and harmonizing the child’s whole

being—thinking, feeling, and willing. Rudolf Steiner gives a
wealth of indications in these lectures that cover all subjects of
the curriculum, showing how to teach the individual subjects
artistically, imaginatively, and in such a way that they
strengthen the inner being, the true Self of the child. Rudolf
Steiner’s concern is that growing children be brought into a
healthy relationship with themselves and with the world
around them. The teacher’s presentation must therefore
breathe between self and world, thus giving the solid moral
foundation upon which the children can build their lives.
He gives expression to this task in The Foundations of Human
Experience and again in the first lecture of this volume, namely,
the harmonization of the child’s essential individuality (spirit-
soul) with his or her living, hereditary, physical body (life-
body). In the third lecture he addresses this harmonization by
way of the two streams in the arts: the sculptural-pictorial on
the one hand and the musical-poetic on the other. Rudolf
Steiner also developed the art of eurythmy as a higher synthesis
of the two, and spoke of it as “visible music and visible speech.”
In a masterful way, Rudolf Steiner opens new vistas for the
teacher, shedding light on these two poles for the enhancement
of the work with the children. He suggests that if it were possi-
ble to live solely in our mental images, in conceptual activity, we
would live in a realm that consists only of reflected images of
the objects of the visible, physical world. This is the world we
analyze, dissect, name, and isolate. It manifests in us as the
sphere of the past. Therefore, when we work to develop the chil-
dren’s mental, conceptual side, we must enliven what is dying
into the fixed and static condition of our conceptual thought
life by quickening it with the help of the pictorial, sculptural
element, through drawing, modeling or painting. Crafts and
woodwork, which are part of the Waldorf curriculum, also
x PRACTICAL ADVICE TO TEACHERS
quicken the child’s conceptual life. This is the pole of the grow-
ing child that suffers much in this information age, that is
always in danger of becoming too fixed and static, too hard-
ened. This tendency toward hardening is one effect on our con-
ceptual life of the overload of factual information.
The information age has a different effect on the human
will, on human initiative and motivation. It has the effect of
putting us to sleep as far as our personal engagement and
exploration of the received data is concerned. We feel unmoti-
vated and lethargic, we look at the world through a spectator
mentality, not willing to activate ourselves. This is a particu-
larly formidable challenge for growing children who have to
form a healthy relationship with the world and with their social
environment. It is astonishing to witness how lethargic a great
many children have become through our modern culture. It is
more and more challenging for them to direct their will and
attention toward purposeful doing. At an early age they
become used to being entertained, and consequently do not get
the chance to engage in the kind of nature-related practical
activities they need in order to become balanced human beings
in later life. Here, the healing aspect of Rudolf Steiner’s educa-
tion, which is an education through and of the will, becomes
very evident. It is the arts that have the mission to connect
growing children with their active, striving, energetic, creative
Self. It is particularly the head pole of the human being that
needs more and more enlivening through the elements of
imagination and creativity imbuing each subject. The head
pole, the conceptual thought life, is the Apollonian form ele-
ment that is easily in danger of becoming fixed.
Rudolf Steiner describes three stages in the development of
the child between the ages of seven and fourteen. In the begin-
ning of the first stage, he connects the activities of writing and
reading with the intellectual form pole. Both rest on convention
Foreword xi
and are valuable only for our earthly life. He now shows how
these activities can be balanced in their effect on the child by
developing them out of the artistic element of drawing. This is
also the path taken by the historical development of writing.
From early pictographs, (Sumerian, Egyptian and Chinese cul-
tures), individual writing styles were developed. By taking the
path from drawing to writing and having the letters emerge out
of the drawn picture, the child experiences the process as form-
ing a meaningful whole. The artistic activity harmonizes and
enlivens the more intellectual, conventional aspect of writing
and its continuation, reading. This path is the path of will,
from art to writing—where the child is still actively engaged—
to reading, which is the most intellectual process.
This is one example of how all teaching is drawn from the
artistic realm, where creative life is at the core of all experience.
The whole method with which we approach the child must be
steeped in artistry, that is, it must be imaginative, living, color-
ful, immediate, engaging. By thus harmonizing the experience
of learning, we can awaken interest in the events of the world.
Then we will have children and young adults who are open and
eager to explore and discover the world around them.
If we fail to address the heart and will forces of growing chil-
dren, if we fill them with a constant flood of information that
only addresses the conceptual life, the unfulfilled, empty soul
and spirit will opt for thrill-seeking and entertainment, and, as
Rudolf Steiner points out, “animal instinct will grow rampant.”
The musical-poetic element, on the other hand, can provide
a very strong experience, especially for younger children, mak-
ing them dreamy and excarnated. This is connected with the
other pole of human experience, the will pole. An effect of
overexuberant life can manifest in this musical, Dionysian ele-
ment. It can have an excarnating effect on the child; however,
we can keep this effect within healthy bounds by bringing in an
xii PRACTICAL ADVICE TO TEACHERS
element of form through different rhythmic activities with the

young child, and through instrumental music that requires
reading musical notation with the older grades. There is noth-
ing more wonderful and fulfilling in the middle and upper
grades than to start the morning main lesson with recorder
playing, particularly when the children are in groups according
to the recorder they have chosen (soprano, alto, tenor, etc.).
Folk music from around the world, easy classical pieces, and
minuets are heartwarming and bring joy and harmony to the
whole class. The incoming astral forces of the preteen and teen-
ager are balanced and clarified by lifting the soul—pure music
in many ways—into the realm of good music.
In the earlier grades, rhythmic activities are used to intro-
duce arithmetic: rhythmic counting and walking, clapping and
stamping, and many other activities that the teacher can
develop. The learning of the multiplication tables is steeped in
and accompanied by rhythmic activity. The musical basis of
number work thus becomes a vivid experience for the child.
Rudolf Steiner then goes even a step further in his illustra-
tion of these two artistic streams that are such an intrinsic part
of the Waldorf approach to teaching. He points to the effect of
these two streams on human nature, and thus gives the teacher
another profound insight for the harmonization of the class.
The musical-poetic stream, the auditory arts, have a socializing
effect on the students because they do these activities together.
The sculptural-pictorial, the visual arts, on the other hand,
have an individualizing effect (lecture 3). Here the teacher
receives tremendous help and a deep understanding of how to
use the arts as healing elements. To balance a class that perhaps
is already too critical, the teacher can put more emphasis on
music and recitation, while the teacher who sees that a class has
become a bit too social can choose for some time to put more
emphasis on the sculptural-pictorial element.
Foreword xiii
The second stage to which Rudolf Steiner points is the

developmental step that takes place between the ages of nine
and twelve. After the nine-year change, the child awakens more
consciously to the environment. Steiner shows that particularly
here we have to observe our teaching method carefully. At this
time, when children develop their subject-object consciousness,
their consciousness of the adult, their self-awareness grows as
their ego experience is strengthened and consolidated. With
this new self experience also comes a greater awareness of their
natural and human environment.
With the children’s greater awakeness and awareness of the
surrounding world, Rudolf Steiner suggests in the curriculum
that the teacher now should lead them in an age-appropriate
way into the life sciences. The children of this age, in fourth
grade, have a natural love for the animal world, while the inter-
est in plant life takes a little longer to develop.
Before fourth grade, the life sciences are presented to the
children through nature and seasonal stories, through practical
activities such as gardening, farming, harvesting, and cooking
and through such main lesson topics as clothing and house-
building. In lecture 11, Rudolf Steiner points out that a child
who has had an experience with a plough or a harrow will
become a different person because of it. This healthy contact
with the earth—actually doing something instead of just look-
ing at a picture of the activity—gives the soul life of the child a
groundedness that shows itself in self-confidence and self-reli-
ance. This is another example why it is particularly urgent in
our time to let the child have healthy experiences. Only by
doing the activities do the children really gain abilities and
skills that later on they can depend upon.
As we can see in lecture 7, the approach to the life sciences in
Waldorf education is also through the artistic element. The
threefold aspect of the human form—the head, trunk, and
xiv PRACTICAL ADVICE TO TEACHERS
limbs—as seen in relation to the animal world, is the basis for

this artistic experience. The freedom that human beings have
through their upright posture and the consequent free use of
their hands is the external manifestation of our true humanity
giving us the possibility for selfless service to the other king-
doms. Through images such as these, we clearly lay the
groundwork for a feeling of moral responsibility. For, moral
concepts are not awakened by appealing to the children’s intel-
lect but only by appealing to their feelings and will.
The feeling life of the child will be further engaged by pre-
senting each animal in a phenomenological way that aims at
characterizing the environment in which the species lives and its
specialized interactions from birth to death. This awakens a
feeling for the differences among the various animals described
and the particular environments in which they live. Further-
more, we help the children see the perfected specialization of
each animal species, be it a wing, fin, webbed foot, claw, and so
on, in contrast to the blessing and gift of the nonspecialization
of the human physical body with its infinite possibilities to cre-
ate and invent.
Approaching science this way with fourth graders and inte-
grating artistic activities into this process will connect them
with their natural environment with awe, wonder, interest, and
love. In this way we establish a healthy heart relationship that
will remain a living experience from childhood through adult-
hood. This moral relationship of appreciation and responsibil-
ity is the foundation that underlies Waldorf teaching.
Rudolf Steiner also draws our attention to the third stage of
development that occurs during the child’s elementary grades.
At the age of twelve or thirteen, another important phase
begins. The children are moving toward puberty. During this
time, the “spirit and soul elements in the human being are
reinforced and strengthened, that is to say those spirit and soul
Foreword xv
elements that are less dependent on the ego” (lecture 8). It is the
astral body that permeates the etheric body and invigorates it.
The astral body, among other things, infuses the child’s soul
with interest in what works in the outer world to link one event
with another. The capacity to think about cause and effect
awakens, and study of the physical sciences begins. Here again
we see what is a hallmark of Waldorf education, that we wait for
the inner developmental step to occur and then we support it
with the appropriate educational measure. At this age, then, it is
appropriate to present the cause-and-effect-based phenomena of
physics.
With these inflowing astral forces, interest in historical
observation and development also awakens. In fifth grade we
begin ancient history through story and biography, while in
sixth grade we can add to our presentations the thread of his-
torical connections; for example, we present the crusades
inspired by religious fervor and show their very unexpected his-
torical consequences. What is often taught under the name of
history, dates of kings and battles (though some are necessary
and helpful) is dead and completely uninspiring. This is not
history. “The real essence of humanity lives in historical
impulses” (lecture 8).
The teacher is called upon to open the eyes of the students to
the evolution of human culture around the world and to the
place and influence of the individual in historical development.
The students begin to see the human being evolve through time
as they live through the struggles, challenges, and triumphs of
human life. Presented vividly and in full, pictorial images, his-
tory is not just more knowledge, but is as much food for the
soul and spirit of the young person as fairy tales and nature sto-
ries are for the first grader. Many questions of students in the
older grades, spoken or unspoken, revolve around “who am I
and what am I doing here?” By experiencing human struggle as
xvi PRACTICAL ADVICE TO TEACHERS
revealed through historical development and biographies, the

young people receive profound answers that stir their souls.
The Waldorf teacher often has the opportunity to experience
this in conversations that arise particularly intensely around
historical issues.
Much should be integrated into all the subjects taught, espe-
cially into history. Geography, life and physical sciences, miner-
alogy, meteorology, philosophy, literature, art and more should
be incorporated into history presentations. We must bring
unity and connectedness into teaching. Subjects should flow
together, rather than be so strictly divided, which is not lifelike
and leads to specialization. Steiner sees this as inappropriate
during the school years. He shows, rather, how everything that
children and young people learn during their school years
should be linked with practical human life. He also points out
that the teacher must be thoroughly immersed in practical life
and teach out of the reality of life. “This ideal of unity that fills
the human soul must pulse through all teaching,” (lecture 12).
Rudolf Steiner links specialization with consequences that
become visible in later life. In the subconscious, lack of con-
nectedness promotes feelings of insecurity and incompetence,
even fear of life.
He continues with this topic, pointing out that most people
use machines developed by human thought (be it train, car,
washing machine, toaster, telephone, computer, etc.) and yet
they have no inkling “as to the workings of physics and mechan-
ics that propel it” (lecture 12). Not bothering ourselves to pene-
trate this manufactured world, and the consequent insecurities
arising from this, enabled mass culture and expert worship to
arise in the twentieth century. At the same time, common sense
and self-reliant thinking have dwindled dramatically.
Linking teaching to practical life means that in addition to
having a thorough knowledge of how things work, students will
Foreword xvii
also become acquainted with banking and bookkeeping, and

the writing of business letters. This practical approach in teach-
ing will give young people a healthy self-reliance, and the possi-
bility in adulthood to demonstrate independence in thought
and action.
Establishing this healthy connection to life will also work
against sentimentalism, which is often dragged into education
out of a desire to awaken idealism. Rudolf Steiner points out
that sentimentalism will decidedly call forth the opposite
effect. Idealism arises through practical engagement with life.
At times in these lectures, Rudolf Steiner deals with the par-
ticular situations facing the opening of the first Waldorf school
in Stuttgart, Germany. These few dated indications must not
deter us from seeing the uniqueness and universality of this
education that today is practiced in Waldorf schools all over the
world.
In his closing words to the teachers (lecture 14), Steiner
brings before them the ideal of a healthy and inspired teacher,
one who can be a true model for children. It is also the ideal of
a healthy human being in general but one that is particularly
necessary for the teaching profession. However, it can also
stand for the kind of human beings that Waldorf education
wants to foster:
Human beings of initiative

Human beings interested in the world
Human beings who seek the truth
Human beings who will not sour.
Astrid Schmitt-Stegmann
Lecture One
AUGUST 21, 1919
My dear friends, first we must make the distinction that the lec-
tures on education in general differ from those in this course,
which will deal more with specific teaching methods. I would
also like to say a few words as an introduction, since the meth-
ods we will use differ from the prevalent teaching methods,
which are based on premises very different from ours. Our own
methods will certainly not differ from the other methods
applied so far merely out of obstinacy, for the sake of being new
or different. They will be different because we must begin to see
the special tasks of our age and how we must teach so that
future humanity can fulfill the developmental impulses pre-
scribed by the universal cosmic order.
We must realize above all that by employing our method we
will, in a certain way, harmonize the higher human being (the
human spirit and soul) with the physical body (our lower
being). The subjects you teach will not be treated as they have
been up to now. In a way, you must use them to develop the
soul and physical forces of the individual correctly. The impor-
tant thing for you is not to transmit information as such but to
utilize knowledge to develop human capacities. First and fore-
most, you must begin to distinguish between the conventional
subject matter of tradition (though this may not be stated
clearly and concisely) and knowledge based on the recognition
of universal human nature.
2 PRACTICAL ADVICE TO TEACHERS
When you teach children reading and writing today, simply

consider the place of reading and writing in culture as a whole.
We read, but the art of reading evolved through the develop-
ment of culture. The shapes of our letters and the connections
among their shapes are purely a matter of convention. By
teaching children reading as it exists today, we teach them
something that means absolutely nothing to them as human
beings, apart from its context within a particular cultural
period. We must be aware that nothing we practice in terms of
material culture has any direct significance whatsoever for sup-
raphysical humankind or for the supraphysical world. The
belief advocated in certain quarters (especially among spiritual-
ists) is that spirits use human script to bring the suprasensory
into the physical world; in reality, this is incorrect. Human
writing is derived from human activity and convention on the
physical plane. Spirits are not the least interested in complying
with such physical conventions. Although it is true that spirits
communicate with us, they do so only through the medium of
a person who fulfills a kind of translation function; spirits do
not themselves directly transform what lives in them into a
form that can be written and read. The reading and writing
you teach children is based on convention; it came about
within the realm of physical life itself.
Teaching children arithmetic is a very different matter. You
get the sense that the most important thing in arithmetic is not
the shapes of the numbers but the reality living in them. This
living reality has much more meaning for the spiritual world
than what lives in reading and writing. Finally, if we begin to
teach children various activities that we may call artistic, we
enter an area that has a definite, eternal meaning—something
that reaches up into the activity of the human spirit and soul. In
teaching children reading and writing, we work in the most
exclusively physical domain; in arithmetic our teaching becomes
Lecture One 3
less physical; and in music or drawing, or in related fields, we

really teach the children’s soul and spirit.
In a rationally conducted lesson we can combine these three
impulses of the supraphysical in artistic activity, the partially
supraphysical in arithmetic, and the completely physical in
reading and writing. In this way, we harmonize the human
being. Imagine, for example, approaching a child by saying,
“You have seen a fish, haven’t you?” (Today I am merely intro-
ducing the subject, just touching on certain points aphoristi-
cally.) “Try to remember what the fish looked like when you
saw it. If I do this on the blackboard, it looks very like a fish,
doesn’t it.” [See sketch on left.]
“The fish you saw looked something like this drawing on the
blackboard. Imagine you wanted to say ‘fish.’ What you say
when you speak the word fish is present in this sign [on the
left]. Now try not to say ‘fish,’ but only start to say it.” Here we
try to teach the child only to begin the word fish—“f-f-f.”
“There, you see, you have started to say ‘fish.’ Now suppose
people in ancient times gradually began to simplify this sign
[see right sketch]. When you start to say ‘fish,’ ‘f-f-f,’ you
express this in writing by making only this sign. People call this
sign f. So you have learned that what you express by saying
‘fish’ begins with f. Now you write it down as f. Whenever you
start writing ‘fish,’ you breathe f-f-f with your breath. So you
learn the sign for when you start to say ‘fish.’”
When you begin by appealing to children’s nature this way, you

really transport them to earlier cultural ages, because this is the
way writing originally came about. Later on, the process became a
mere convenience, so we no longer recognize the relationship
between the abstract shapes of letters and the images that came
about purely through things that were seen and reproduced as
drawings. All letters arose from such image forms. And now con-
sider that if you teach the child only what is conventional by say-
ing “This is how you make an f,” what you teach is purely
derivative and unrelated to any human context. This is how we
divorce writing from its original context, the medium of art.
So we begin to teach writing by using art and by drawing
forms; we use the forms of consonants when we want to reach
back far enough that children will be moved by the differences
in the forms. It is not enough to tell the children merely
through speaking, which is exactly why people are the way they
are today. By removing the shapes of letters from the current
convention and showing their source, we move the whole being
of the child, who thus becomes very different than would oth-
erwise be the case if we appeal only to the intellect. We must
not allow ourselves to think only in abstractions. Instead, we
must teach art in drawing and so on, teach soul substance in
arithmetic, and teach reading and use art to teach the conven-
tional in writing. In other words, we must permeate all of our
teaching with an element of art.
From the very beginning we will have to greatly emphasize
our encouragement of children’s artistic capacities. The artistic
element especially affects the human will in a powerful way. So
we arrive at what is related to the whole human being, whereas
everything related to convention remains in the realm of the
head. So we proceed in a way that enables every child to draw
and paint. We start with the simplest level, with drawing and
painting. We also begin by cultivating music so that children
Lecture One 5
quickly become accustomed to handling a musical instrument;

this also generates an artistic feeling in children. From this,
children also learn to sense in their whole being what would
otherwise be mere convention.
Our task is to find teaching methods that continually engage
the whole human being. We would not succeed in this
endeavor if we failed to concentrate on developing the human
sense of art. By developing this sense we lend strength to the
future inclination of children to become interested in the world
in ways that are appropriate to each individual’s total being.
The fundamental flaw so far has been the way people inhabit
the world with only the head, and the rest of their being merely
trails along behind. Consequently, those other human aspects
are now guided by animal urges that indulge only untamed
emotions, which we are currently experiencing in what we see
spreading so strangely from the eastern part of Europe. This
phenomenon arose because people have not been nurtured in
their wholeness. It is not simply a matter of cultivating the
artistic aspect; our teaching itself, in every subject, must be
drawn from the artistic realm. Every method must be perme-
ated by the artistic element. Education must become a true art.
The subject of the lesson itself should not become more impor-
tant than the underlying basis. Drawing thus provides first the
written forms of letters and then their printed forms. Based on
drawing, we build up to reading. As you will see, this is how we
strike a chord with which the souls of children happily vibrate,
because they are then no longer interested in the external
aspects but see, for example, how a breathed sound is expressed
in reading and writing.
Consequently, we will have to rearrange much of how we
teach. You will find that what we aim at in reading and writing
today cannot, of course, be established exclusively as indicated
here; all we can do is awaken the necessary forces as a basis. If we
were to base our teaching only on the process of drawing evolv-

ing toward reading and writing (modern life being what it is),
we would have to keep the children in school until they were
twenty. The normal period of education would not be enough.
All we can do now is accomplish our method in principle while
continuing to educate the children and retaining the artistic
element.
After working through the letters in this way for a while, we
must make the children understand that adults are able to dis-
cover meaning in these strange shapes. While cultivating what
the child has learned from isolated instances we go on (regard-
less of whether the details have been understood) to writing
whole sentences. In sentences the children will notice shapes,
for example, the f they are familiar with in fish. They will
notice other shapes as well that cannot be addressed individu-
ally, because there will not be enough time.
The next step is to write the various printed letters on the
blackboard, and then one day we put a whole long sentence on
the board and say to the children, “This is what adults see
when they have formed everything in the way we formed the f
in fish.” Then we teach them to copy the writing. Make sure
that what they see passes through their hands, so that they not
only read with their eyes but also form what they read with
their hands. In this way they come to know that they them-
selves can give form to whatever is on the blackboard. We do
not let the children learn to read unless they can form what
they see with their hands, both handwritten and printed letters.
We thus accomplish something that is very important—chil-
dren never read with their eyes only, but the activity of the eyes
passes mysteriously into the whole activity of their limbs. Chil-
dren then feel unconsciously, all the way into their legs, what
would otherwise pass only through their eyes. Our aim is to
interest the whole human being in this activity.
Lecture One 7
Afterward we may reverse the procedure. We can fragment

the sentence we have written, break up the words, and show
the forms of the letters we have not yet derived from their ele-
ments; we go from the whole to its parts. For example, if we
have written the word head, the children learn to write “head”
simply by copying it. Then we separate the word into its letters,
h-e-a-d, and thus go from the whole to its parts.
This sequence of starting with the whole and proceeding to
its parts must, in fact, be present in all that we teach. In
another situation, we could take a piece of paper and cut it into
a number of pieces. We might count the pieces—let’s say there
are twenty-four—and say to the child, “Look, I describe these
pieces of paper I cut up by what I wrote here: twenty-four
pieces of paper.” It could just as easily be beans or whatever.
“Now watch carefully. I take some pieces of paper away and
make another little pile. Then I make a third and fourth pile. I
have made four little piles from the twenty-four pieces of paper.
Now I will count the pieces. You are still unable to do that, but
I can. The pieces in the first pile I will call ‘nine,’ those in the
second ‘five,’ those in the third ‘seven,’ and those in the fourth
‘three.’ You see, at first I had only one pile of twenty-four pieces
of paper. Now I have four piles of nine, five, seven, and three
pieces. It is all the same paper. If I gather it all together, I call it
‘twenty-four’; if I have it in four little piles, I call it ‘nine,’ ‘five,’
‘seven,’ and ‘three’ pieces. Now twenty-four pieces of paper are
nine, five, seven, and three pieces together.”
This is how I have taught the children to add. I did not start
with the separate pieces from which a sum would be derived.
This would, in fact, be out of keeping with the original nature
of the human being.1 It is actually this reversed procedure that
1. Refer to A Theory of Knowledge Based on Goethe’s World Conception by Rudolf

Steiner.
is appropriate to human nature—first the sum is considered,

which is then divided into the separate parts. We teach children
addition by reversing the usual procedure; we begin with the
sum and then proceed to the addenda. Children will under-
stand the concept of “together” much better this way than if we
take the parts separately first and then bring them together in
the usual way. Our teaching methods will have to differ from
the ordinary; we will teach children the reversed way, so to
speak, about what a total is as opposed to its separate parts.
Then we can also expect a very different comprehension from
the children than we would if we used the opposite procedure.
You will discover what is most important about this method
only with practical experience. You will notice how children
immerse themselves in the subject in a very different way and
how they will have a different capacity to absorb what is taught
when you begin in this way.
You can apply the opposite process for the next step in arith-
metic. You say, “Now I will put all the pieces of paper together
again. I take some away, making two piles, and call the pile I
took away ‘three.’ How did I arrive at three? By taking it away
from the others. But when they were together I called the pile
‘twenty-four.’ Now I have taken three away and call the
remainder ‘twenty-one.’” This is how you proceed to the con-
cept of subtraction. Once again, do not begin with the whole
and what is to be subtracted; instead, begin with the remainder
that is left over and lead from that to the whole from which it
came. Here you go by the reverse path.
In this way, you can extend to all of arithmetic as an art the
method of always going from the whole to its parts. You will see
this later when we come to the methods for particular subjects.
We must simply accustom ourselves to a teaching process that is
very different from what we are used to. We proceed in a way
that not only nurtures the subject we impart (which cannot, of
Lecture One 9
course, be ignored, though a rather disproportionate amount of

attention is given to it today) but also, at the same time, fosters
the children’s sense for authority. We say continually, “I call this
‘twenty-four’” or “I call this ‘nine.’” When I stress in lectures on
spiritual science that a “sense for authority” must be nurtured
between the ages of seven and fourteen, I do not mean that we
must drill children into a feeling for authority. The element that
is needed flows from the very technique of teaching, which
reigns as an undertone. For example, a child listens and says,
“Oh, he calls that ‘nine,’ and he calls that ‘twenty-four.’” A
spontaneous obedience arises by listening to a person teaching
in this way, and children are thus permeated with what should
emerge as the sense for authority. This is the secret. Any unnat-
ural drilling of the sense for authority should not be included
because of the very nature of the method.
Next we must develop a fully conscious, ongoing desire to
effect harmony of the will, feeling, and thinking, which do, in
fact, work together when we teach in this way. It is a matter of
continually guiding the will in the proper direction by avoiding
false methods. We must stimulate the appropriate expression of
a stronger will through the use of artistic methods. From the
very beginning, this aim is served by painting and musical
instruction. You will notice that, early in the second period of
life, children are more receptive to authority in teaching
through art. Consequently, we can accomplish the most in this
sense during this period of children’s lives using artistic meth-
ods. They will very effortlessly find their way into what we
wish to communicate to them and take the greatest delight in
rendering it by drawing or even painting. We should make
sure, however, that they avoid merely imitative work.
We must also remember to “transport” children back to earlier
eras, but we should not act as though we still remain in those
ages. People were different then. You will transport the children
back to those earlier cultural ages that had a different disposition

of soul and spirit. This is why, when drawing, we do not aim to
make children copy anything. We teach them archetypal forms
in drawing by showing them how to make one angle like this or
another like that. We try to reveal the circle and the spiral to
them. We begin with the form as such; what it imitates is unim-
portant. We simply try to awaken their interest in the form itself.
You may recall a lecture in which I tried to awaken a feeling

for the process of the acanthus leaf’s development. There I
explained that it is completely erroneous to believe that the
acanthus leaf was copied as it appears in legend.2 It simply
arose from an inner formative impulse and was not felt until
later; this resembles nature. Thus, it was not a matter of imitat-
ing nature. We must take this into consideration in relation to
drawing and painting. This will finally put an end to the atro-
cious error that deadens human minds. Wherever people
2. Acanthus (bear’s breech) is a perennial herb or shrub native to the Mediterra-

nean, having pinnately lobed basal leaves with spiny edges and spiked white or
purple flowers. Greek and Roman architects used stylized representations of its
leaves on the capitals of Corinthian columns; see “True Artistic Creation” (part
2, lecture 1), Architecture As a Synthesis of the Arts, Rudolf Steiner Press, London,
1999 (GA 286).
Lecture One 11
encounter something artificial, they might say it looks natural

or unnatural. It is completely irrelevant to decide whether
something is copied properly or not. Resemblance to the exter-
nal should appear only as a secondary consideration. What
should live in people is their intimacy with the forms them-
selves. Even when drawing a nose, we must relate inwardly to
the shape of the nose, so that only later does the resemblance to
the shape of a nose become obvious. In children between the
ages of seven and fourteen, we can never awaken a sense of the
inner laws of phenomena by imitating what is external. We
must realize that what we are able to develop in children
between the ages of seven and fourteen cannot be developed
later. The forces active during that period fade. Later on, all
that can arise is a substitution, unless the person is completely
transformed through initiation, either naturally or unnaturally.
I will now say something unusual; we must, however, refer
back to the principles of human nature in order to be teachers
in the truest sense today. In exceptional cases there are those
who can recover a certain amount later in life. But they would
have had to go through a severe illness or suffered a deformity
of some kind—for example, a broken a leg that was then not
set properly. In other words, it must have been something that
caused a kind of loosening between the etheric body and the
physical body. This, of course, is dangerous. When it happens
because of karma, we can only accept it. But we cannot rely on
it; nor can we pass a law saying that a person shall in this way
make up for something missed (to say nothing of other mat-
ters). Human development is mysterious, and all that we strive
for in teaching and education should never be concerned with
the abnormal but always with the normal. Teaching, therefore,
is always a social matter, and we must always consider the
appropriate age for developing specific forces, so that their cul-
tivation will enable individuals to assume their positions in life
in the right way. We must face the fact that certain capacities
can unfold only between the seventh and fourteenth years in
such a way that a person can cope with life later on. If such
capacities are not developed during this period, people cannot
contend with life’s later struggles. And this is indeed the situa-
tion for most people today.
As teachers, we must provide those we educate with the abil-
ity to artistically assume their place in the activities of the
world. Human nature, we will find, is such that we are, in a
way, born musicians. If people were sufficiently agile, they
would dance and move in some way with all little children. We
are born into the world in a way that makes us want to join the
world with our own bodily nature in a musical rhythm and
relationship; this inner musical capacity is strongest in children
during their third and fourth years. Parents could do a great
deal if they would simply notice this, starting not so much with
external musicality but with an attunement of the physical
body and the element of dance.
It is exactly during this period of life that an infinite amount
of good can be gained by permeating the bodies of little chil-
dren with elementary eurythmy. If only parents learned to do
eurythmy with their children, something very different would
arise in them than is usual. They would overcome a kind of
heaviness that lives in the limbs. We all have this heaviness in
the limbs today, and this could be overcome. When children
change their teeth, the foundation for everything musical
would thus remain in them. The individual senses arise from
this musical element—a musically attuned ear or an eye for
shapes and forms. A musically attuned ear and an eye that
appreciates line and form are specializations of the whole musi-
cal human being.
Thus, we must cherish the idea that by drawing on the artis-
tic element, we assimilate the disposition of the entire human
Lecture One 13
being into the upper, or sensory, human. Through music,

drawing, or modeling, we lift the realm of feeling into the
intellectual sphere. But this must happen in the right way.
Today everything becomes blurred and mixed together, espe-
cially in cultivating the artistic. We both draw and model with
our hands, and yet these two activities are completely different.
This is expressed with particular clarity when we introduce
children to art. When we guide children into the realm of
something that can be modeled, we must, as much as possible,
see that they follow the forms with their hands. By feeling their
way, they make their own forms; by moving their hands and
drawing, children are led to follow the forms with their eyes
and also with the will emerging through their eyes. It does not
violate their naïveté to teach children to follow the forms of the
body with the hollow of the hand or to make them aware of
their eyes—for example, by allowing children to follow a com-
plete circle with their eyes and saying, “You are making a circle
with your eyes.” This does not wound a child’s innocence but
rather engages the interest of the whole human being. Conse-
quently, we must become aware that we are lifting the lower
part of the human being into the higher part, or sensory being.
Thus we shall gain a certain feeling, which in turn becomes
the foundation of our method. It is a feeling we must each cul-
tivate in ourselves as teachers, since it cannot be imparted
directly to anyone else. Imagine that we have here before us a
human being, a child, whom we will teach and educate. As far
as education is concerned, perception of the child as a growing
human being is vanishing today; everything is confused. We
must learn to differentiate in how we regard this child. We
must, in a certain sense, accompany our teaching with inner
sensations, with feelings, and with an inner stirring of the will
that vibrates in a lower octave, without being acted out. We
must be aware that, in a growing child, the I and the astral
body develop gradually and that, owing to heredity, the etheric

and the physical bodies are there to begin with.
It would be good to consider this: the physical and etheric
bodies, in particular, are always cultivated from the head
down. In fact, the head rays out what creates the physical
human being. If we practice education properly in relation to
the head, we serve the growth processes in the best way possi-
ble. When we teach children in such a way that the head aspect
is drawn out of the whole being, then what is appropriate
moves from the head to the limbs; that person grows better,
learns to walk better, and so on. Consequently, we can say that
if we develop everything related to the upper human being in
the appropriate way, the physical and the etheric will flow
downward. If, when we teach reading and writing in a more
intellectual way, we have the feeling that the child is open to us
while absorbing what we offer, it is sent out from the head into
the rest of the body.
The I-being and astral body, on the other hand, are formed
from below upward when the child’s whole being is encom-
passed by education. A strong feeling of the I arises, for exam-
ple, when we offer children elementary eurythmy between
their third and fourth years. This claims the whole person and
a proper feeling of I takes root in the child’s being. Further-
more, when we often tell them things that bring them joy and
other things that cause pain, the astral body takes form from
the lower being up. For a moment, just consider your own
experiences a little more intimately. I suspect that you have all
had this experience: while walking along the street, something
startled you. As a result, you found that not only were your
head and heart shocked, but the feeling of shock lingered on
even in your limbs. You can conclude, therefore, that in surren-
dering to something, feelings and excitement are released and
affect your whole being, not just the heart and head.
Lecture One 15
Educators must keep this truth very clearly in mind. They

must make sure that the child’s whole being is moved. Consider,
from this point of view, telling legends and fairy tales. If you have
the right feeling for the stories and tell them from your own
inner qualities, the way you tell them enables children to feel
something of what is told with the whole body. Then you really
address the child’s astral body. Something radiates from the astral
body up into the head, something that the child should feel
there. You should have the sense that you are gripping the whole
child and that, from the feelings and excitement you arouse, an
understanding of what you are saying comes to the child. Thus,
you may consider that the ideal when telling legends or fairy
tales, or while drawing or painting with children, is not to
explain anything or work with concepts, but to move their whole
being. As a result, later on when they leave you, out of them-
selves they will understand what you told them. Try therefore to
educate the I-being and astral body from below upward so that
the head and heart follow later. Try not to tell the stories in a way
that causes children to reflect and understand them in the head.
Tell them in a way that evokes a kind of silent, thrilled awe
(within limits) and in a way that evokes pleasures and sorrows
that continue to echo after the child has left you, gradually to be
transformed into understanding and interest. Try to allow your
influence to arise from your intimacy with the children. Try not
to arouse interest artificially by counting on sensation; instead,
attempt to achieve an inner relationship with the children and
then allow interest to arise from their own being.
How can you do this with a whole class? It is relatively sim-
ple with an individual child. As long as you try to do things
with a child only out of fondness and love for that child, you
will find that you reach the whole being, not just the heart and
head. And it is no more difficult to do this with a whole class if
what you say and do moves you and if you are not interested
only with your heart and head. As a simple example, let’s say
that I wish to teach a child about the continuation of the soul’s
life after death. I would only deceive myself and never make it
clear to the child if I taught only theories about it. There is no
concept that can teach a child under fourteen about immortal-
ity. I could say, however, “See this chrysalis; it is empty. Once
there was a butterfly inside, but it crept away.” I could also
demonstrate the process of how metamorphosis happens. It is
good to show such things to children. Then I make a compari-
son: “Imagine that it is you who are the chrysalis. Your soul is
inside you, and later it will emerge just as a butterfly emerges
from its chrysalis. This, of course, is rather naively stated.
You can talk about this for a long time. However, if you your-
self do not believe that the butterfly is an image of the human
soul, you cannot accomplish much with children by using this
analogy. You should not allow yourself the false notion that this
whole idea is merely a contrived comparison, which it is not; it is
a fact presented to us by the divine, cosmic order. These things
are not invented by the intellect, and if our attitude toward such
matters is correct, we come to trust the fact that all nature offers
us analogies for the realities of soul and spirit.
As we unite with what we teach children, the way we work
affects their whole being. When we can no longer feel with
children and instead offer only rational translations of every-
thing that we ourselves do not believe in, we cease to teach chil-
dren very much. Our relationship to reality must be such that,
out of our own comprehension, we bring to children’s souls
more than an arbitrary picture of the butterfly emerging from
the chrysalis, for example, and instead present something we
ourselves understand and believe in as given by divine cosmic
powers. We must not offer children understanding merely for
their ears, but we must communicate from soul to soul. If you
remember this, you will make progress.
Lecture Two
AUGUST 22, 1919
Now we will develop more fully what we only outlined yester-

day. You will see from what was said that, even in the details of
teaching, there is much that needs to be transformed and
renewed.
Consider for a moment what I pointed out to you an hour
ago.1 If you think about what I presented, you will realize that
human beings carry three inner focal points, and within each,
affinity and aversion meet. We can say that aversion and affin-
ity even meet in the head. We can simplify it schematically.
Imagine that in a certain part of the head, the nervous system is
first interrupted while sensory perceptions enter, and they
encounter aversion arising from the individual. This example
demonstrates how we must view each individual system anew
in the whole human being. Sensory activity itself is essentially a
kind of delicate limb activity; it occurs in such a way that affin-
ity dominates the senses, and the nervous system sends aversion
to meet it. In the activity of seeing, a kind of affinity occurs in
the eye’s blood vessels. Aversion flows through that affinity in
its nervous system. This is how seeing takes place.
And more important to us, for the moment, a second meet-
ing takes place between affinity and aversion in the central
part of the human being. Affinity and aversion also meet
1. See lecture 2, The Foundations of Human Experience (previously Study of Man).

there; thus, in the middle system, the chest region, there is

another meeting of affinity and aversion. Again, the whole
human being is active as affinity and aversion meet, with our
awareness, in the middle system. You also know that this
meeting can be expressed in response to an impression—a
rapid reflex involving very little thought, since it is simply an
evasive, instinctive act directed against a perceived threat.
These subconscious reflexes are also mirrored in the brain
and the soul, and so the whole again acquires a kind of picto-
rial nature. With images, we accompany what occurs in the
chest (the respiratory and rhythmic system) in relation to the
meeting between affinity and aversion. Something happens
in the breast that is intimately related to the whole life of a
human being. There is a meeting between affinity and aver-
sion that has an extraordinarily significant connection with
our outer life.
In our whole being, we develop a certain activity that
becomes affinity. We cause this affinity to interact continually
in our chest organization with the cosmic activity of aversion.
Human speech is the expression of these sympathetic and anti-
pathetic activities that meet in this way. And the brain comple-
ments this meeting of affinity and aversion in the breast
through our understanding of speech; we follow speech with
understanding. Fundamentally, in speech there is an activity in
the breast, and there is a parallel activity in the head. In the
breast the activity is far more real, whereas the activity in the
head fades to an image. In fact, when you speak, you have a
constant breast activity that you accompany with an image
through the head activity. This makes it obvious that speaking
is based on the constant rhythm of sympathetic and antipa-
thetic activity, just as feeling is. Indeed, speech originates in
feeling. The way we accompany the feeling with the knowledge
or image causes the content of speech to be identical with
Lecture Two 19
thoughts. We understand the speech phenomenon only when

we truly understand how it is rooted in human feeling.
Speech is, in fact, rooted in two ways in human feeling. First,
it is based in everything a human being brings toward the
world through the feeling life. What do we bring to the world
in our feelings? Let us look at a distinct feeling or nuance of
feeling—for example, astonishment or amazement. To the
degree that we remain within the microcosm that is the human
being with our souls, we have amazement. If, however, we can
establish a cosmic connection—a cosmic relationship that can
be connected to this feeling nuance of amazement—then
amazement becomes the sound o.2 The sound of o is really the
breath working in us when caught inwardly by amazement.
Thus, you can consider o an expression of amazement.
In recent times, outer consideration of the world has related
speech only to something external. The question was this: How
did the relationship between sounds and what they mean first
arise? No one realized that everything in the world leaves an
impression on a person’s feelings. In some situations, it may be
so vague that it remains half-unconscious. But we will not find
anything described by a word with the sound o that does not in
some way engender—however slightly—astonishment. If you
say “open,” the word contains an o sound, because something
inherent in it causes slight astonishment. The roots of speech
are contained in human feelings in this way. Feelings link you
to the whole world, and you give the whole world sounds that
in some way express these feeling connections.
Typically, such things have been viewed superficially. There
was the belief, for example, that speech imitates the way an
animal barks or growls. Based on this belief, the well-known
2. The vowels in this context are the pure vowels of the German language: a as in
father, e as in eight, i as in me, o as in order, u as in blue.
“bow-wow” theory of linguistics asserted that all speech is imi-

tation. Such theories are dangerous, because they are partly
true. By copying a dog and saying “bow-wow” (which carries
the feeling nuance expressed in “ow”), one has entered a dog’s
soul condition. The sound is not formed according to theory
but in a less direct way by placing oneself in the dog’s condi-
tion of soul. Another theory maintains that every object con-
tains an inherent sound, just as a bell, for example, has its own
sound. The “ding-dong” theory, as it is called, arose from this
assumption. These are, in fact, the theories. But we cannot
understand the human being unless we acknowledge that
speech expresses the world of feeling connections we form
with objects around us.
We also tend to have a nuance of feeling toward empty or
black objects that is related to emptiness. This feeling toward
anything related to blackness is the feeling of fear or anxiety.
This is expressed in the u sound. The feeling nuance of wonder
and admiration is expressed in the a sound; this is a feeling
toward what is full—everything white, bright, and related to
whiteness and brightness and the feeling toward the sound
related to brightness. When we feel that we must ward off an
external impression or in some way turn away from it for self-
protection, and if that feeling is one of resistance, it is expressed
in the e sound. And its opposite feeling, that of aiming toward,
or approaching and uniting with something, is expressed in the
i sound.
These, then, are the main vowels. We will cover the details
later, including the diphthongs. One other vowel should be
considered, which occurs less frequently in European languages
and expresses something stronger than all the others. If you try
to find a vowel by letting a, o, and u sound together, this
expresses at first a feeling of fear, and then an identification
with what is feared. This sound expresses the most profound
Lecture Two 21
awe. It is found with particular frequency in Asian languages

and shows that Asians are able to develop tremendous awe and
veneration, whereas in Western languages this sound is missing,
since awe and veneration are not the strongest traits of Europe-
ans.
We now have an image of the inner soul moods expressed by
the vowels. All vowels express the inner soul stirring in our
affinity with things. Even when we are afraid, the fear is based
on a mysterious affinity. We would never fear something with-
out having a hidden affinity for it. In examining such matters,
however, you must remember that it is relatively easy to make
the observation that o has something to do with astonishment,
u with fear and anxiety, a with admiration and wonder, e with
resistance, i with approaching something, and aou with venera-
tion. Nevertheless, one’s ability to observe these connections
will be obscured by confusing the feeling nuance that comes
from hearing the sound and the feeling nuance that arises when
speaking the sound. The two are different. You must bear in
mind that the nuances of feeling I have enumerated are related
to communicating the sounds. They apply when you want to
communicate something to someone by using the sound. If
you wish to tell someone that you are afraid, it is expressed by
the u sound. There is a difference of nuance when you yourself
are afraid and when you want to arouse fear in someone else by
articulating u. Your own fear will be echoed back when you
attempt to arouse it in another, for example, by saying to a
child, “u-u” [“ooo”]. It is important to consider this aspect with
regard to the social implications of speech. If you do so, you
will easily see the point.
The feeling here is a pure inner soul process. This soul pro-
cess, which is specifically based on the effect of affinity, can be
met from outside by aversion, and this occurs through the
consonants. When we join a consonant and a vowel, affinity
and aversion mingle, and the tongue, lips, and palate make
themselves felt as organs of aversion that ward things away. If
we spoke only in vowels, we would continually surrender our-
selves. We would, in fact, merge with things and be extremely
selfless; we would unfold our deepest affinity for everything
around us and would withdraw somewhat only because of
nuances of affinity—for example, when we feel fear or horror.
Even our withdrawal would contain an element of affinity.
Vowels are related to our own sounding; likewise, consonants
are related to things, which sound with consonants.
Consequently, you find that we must view vowels as nuances
of feeling, whereas we find that consonants, f, b, m, and so on,
are imitations of external things. Hence, I was correct yesterday
when I showed you how f is related to a fish, since I imitated
the shape of the fish. It is always possible to trace consonants
back to an imitation of external objects, whereas vowels are
very elementary expressions of feeling nuances in people
toward things. Therefore, we can view speech as a confronta-
tion between aversion and affinity. Affinities are always present
in vowels, and aversions are always present in consonants.
We can also view speaking in another way. What kind of
affinity is expressed in the chest region of the human being so
that, as a result, the chest arrests aversion and the head merely
accompanies it? The basis of it is musical, something that has
passed beyond certain boundaries. Music is the foundation, and
it goes beyond certain limits. In a sense, it surpasses itself and
becomes more than music. In other words, to the degree that
speech contains vowels, it encompasses something musical; to
the degree that it contains consonants, it carries a kind of sculp-
ture, or painting. Speech is a genuine synthesis, a true union in
the human being of the musical with the sculptural element.
Thus, we can see that, with a kind of unconscious subtlety,
language reveals not only the nature of individuals but that of
Lecture Two 23
human communities as well. In German, Kopf (“head”)

expresses in every sense a roundness of form. Kopf denotes not
only the human head but also a head of cabbage, for example.
In the word Kopf the form is expressed. The Romance lan-
guages do not depict the form of the head. There [in Italian]
we find the word testa, which expresses something in the soul
realm. Testa expresses the head as witness, something that testi-
fies and identifies. This word for “head” comes from a very dif-
ferent foundation. On the one hand it expresses a sympathetic
feeling of the mind, while, on the other, it depicts a fusion of
aversion with the external world.
For now, let us try to determine the difference in terms of
the main vowels. In Kopf, the o relates to astonishment. The
soul feels something like astonishment in relation to anything
round, because roundness is itself related to all that evokes
astonishment. In testa, the e relates to resistance. If someone
states something, we must in turn assert ourselves and resist;
otherwise, we would simply merge and mingle with that indi-
vidual. This feeling nuance is well expressed where a national
tendency to testify, or witness, is an aspect of the head.
When you consider these matters, you are led away from the
abstraction of looking to see what the dictionary says: this
word for this language, that word for that language. The words
in the different languages are in places taken from quite differ-
ent connections. Merely to compare them is a purely external
matter and to translate by the dictionary is on the whole the
worst kind of translating. The word Fuss in German (“foot”) is
related to taking a step, making an empty space, a Furche (“fur-
row”). The word for “foot” is related to the word for “furrow.”
We take the foot and name it for what it does—make an
impression. The word for “feet” in the Romance languages
[Portuguese], pés, is taken from standing firmly, having a
standpoint.
This linguistic study of meaning is extraordinarily helpful in

teaching, but it does not yet exist as a science. We could ask why
these things are as yet not included in science, even though they
offer real practical help. The reason is that we are still working
out what is necessary for the fifth post-Atlantean age, especially
in terms of education.3 If you accept that speech in this sense
indicates something inward in the vowels and something exter-
nal in the consonants, you will find it very easy to create images
for the consonants. You will no longer need the pictures I will
give you in the next few lectures; you will be able to make your
own and establish an inner connection with the children. This
is much better than merely adopting an outer image. In this way
we recognize speech as a relationship between the human being
and the cosmos. On our own as human beings, we would
merely remain astonished, but our relationship with the cosmos
invokes sounds from our astonishment.
Human beings are embedded in the cosmos in a particular
way, and we can observe this externally. I am saying this
because (as you saw in yesterday’s lecture) much depends on
the nature of our feelings toward growing children—the degree
of reverence we have toward the mysterious revelation of the
cosmos in growing human beings. A tremendous amount
depends on our ability to develop this feeling as teachers and
educators.
Now let’s take a broader view and look again at the significant
fact that the human being takes about eighteen breaths per
minute. How many breaths is this in four minutes? 18 x 4 = 72
breaths. What is the number of breaths in a day? 18 x 60 x 24 =
25,920 per day. I could also calculate this in a different way, by
3. The “fifth post-Atlantean” period refers to our current cultural and historical
era, the fifth since the so-called Atlantean period of earth’s evolution. See An
Outline of Esoteric Science, chapter 4, for a full overview of this subject.
Lecture Two 25
beginning with the number of breaths in four minutes—sev-

enty-two. Then, instead of multiplying this number by 24 x 60,
I would simply multiply it by 6 x 60, or 360; I would arrive at
the same number of 25,920 breaths per day: 360 x 72 = 25,920.
We can say that our breathing for four minutes—breathing in,
breathing out, breathing in, breathing out—is, in a sense, a
microcosmic “day.” The sum of 25,920 I obtained by multiply-
ing it by 360 relates to this as the process of a whole year: the
day of twenty-four hours is like a year for our breathing.
Now we will look at our larger breathing process, which is
made up of a daily alternation between being awake and sleep-
ing. What, basically, is being awake and sleeping? It means that
we breathe something out and breathe something in. We breathe
out our I-being and astral body when we go to sleep, and we
breathe them in when we awake. This occurs during the course
of twenty-four hours. To arrive at a sum for the course of a year,
we must multiply the day by 360. So with the greater breathing
process, in one year we complete something similar to what we
complete in one day with the microcosmic breathing process,
assuming that we multiply what takes place in four minutes by
360. If we multiply what takes place with waking and sleeping
during one day by 360, the answer shows us what takes place in
one year. And if we multiply one year by an average life span—
that is by seventy-two—we arrive again at 25,920.
Now we have discovered a twofold breathing process: our in-
and out-breathing, which takes place seventy-two times in four
minutes and 25,920 times in one day, and our waking and sleep-
ing, which takes place 360 times in one year and 25,920 times
during a lifetime. Furthermore, we find a third breathing process
by following the sun’s course. You know that the spot of the sun-
rise in spring appears to advance slightly every year. After 25,920
years, the sun has moved around the whole ecliptic. Once again
we have the number 25,920 in the planetary cosmic year.
How is our life ingrained in the universe? Our average life

span is seventy-two years. Multiply this by 360, and you arrive
again at 25,920. You can imagine that in a Platonic year—the
cosmic revolution of the sun—our human life span is but a
day. Thus we can regard what is depicted as a year in the uni-
verse as one breath in our human life span and see our human
life span as a day in the great cosmic year. Accordingly, we can
revere even the smallest process as an image of the greater cos-
mic process. If we look at the whole process more closely, we
find in the Platonic year—that is, in what happens during a
Platonic year—an image of the process of evolution from the
old Saturn through the Sun, Moon, and Earth stages and right
up to the Vulcan stage.4 All the processes that take place as
indicated are ordered like breathing processes related to
25,920.
All that occurs in our life between waking and sleeping
expresses the ancient Moon period of evolution, the present
Earth evolution, and the future Jupiter evolution. This
expresses all that makes us members of what exists beyond our
earth. The same thing that makes us earthly human beings also
takes place in our smallest breathing process. As human beings,
our alternation between waking and sleeping expresses our rela-
tionship to the ancient evolutionary periods of Moon, Earth,
and Jupiter, and our life span expresses how, as cosmic human
beings, we are rooted in the conditions of the universal year.
For cosmic life and the whole planetary system, one day of our
lives is a single breath. And all the seventy-two years of our life
are a single day for the being whose organs are our planetary sys-
tem. Overcome the illusion that you are a limited human being;
4. These evolutionary stages have been given planetary names, though they do
not relate directly to the physical planets as such. See An Outline of Esoteric Sci-
ence, chapter 4, “Cosmic Evolution and the Human Being.”
Lecture Two 27
think of yourself as a cosmic process—that is the reality—and

you will be able to say, “I am a breath of the universe.”
If you understand this so that you can remain completely
indifferent to the theoretical aspect (a process of interest only in
passing), and if, on the other hand, you can maintain a feeling of
immeasurable reverence for what is expressed so mysteriously in
every human being, this sense will become the solid foundation
within you that must be the foundation for teaching. In the
future, education cannot proceed merely by bringing conven-
tional, adult life into teaching. It is truly awful to consider the
possibility that in the future, elected parliaments will meet and
decide questions of education based on the recommendations of
those whose only reason for involvement is their sense of democ-
racy. If things develop in this way, as they are now doing in Rus-
sia, the earth would lose its task and have its mission withdrawn;
it would be expelled from the cosmos and fall to Ahriman.5
It is time to derive what belongs to education from our
knowledge of the relationship between humankind and the
cosmos. We must imbue all our teaching with a feeling that
standing before us is a growing human being, one who contin-
ues what took place in the supersensible world before concep-
tion and birth. This feeling must grow from the sort of
recognition we arrived at as we considered the vowels and con-
sonants. This feeling must permeate us completely. Only when
we are truly permeated by this feeling can we teach properly.
Do not believe that this feeling can be fruitless; the human
being is organized so that, if our feelings are oriented correctly,
we will derive our guiding forces from them.
5. Ahriman is the name given a spiritual being who wants to hold humanity in a
hardened, material state and no longer evolving. Lucifer is Ahriman’s counter-
part, who tempts humankind to disembody spiritually, thus “evolving” too
quickly and becoming overly emotional. Rudolf Steiner posited the Christ as
mediator and balance to these two retarding forces.
If you cannot manage to see every human being as a cosmic

mystery, you will not get beyond the sense that people are no
more than mechanisms, and if such a feeling were cultivated, it
would lead to the downfall of earthly culture. On the other
hand, earthly culture is raised only when we permeate educa-
tion with the feeling that the whole human being has cosmic
significance. And this cosmic feeling arises only when we
regard the content of human feeling as belonging to the period
between birth and death. Human thinking indicates the period
before birth, and what exists in the human will points to what
comes after death as a seed for the future. As the threefold
human being stands before us, first we see what belongs to the
time before birth, then we see what lies between birth and
death, and, third, we see what awaits us after death. Our life
before birth enters our existence as images, and the seed of
what lies beyond death exists within us even before death.
Only facts such as these will give you some idea of what
actually happens through human interrelationships. When
reading older works on education (the pedagogy of Herbart,
for example, which was excellent in its day), we always have the
feeling that those people were using concepts that could not
help them reach the world; they remain outside reality.6 Just
consider the way affinity permeates all willing when properly
developed in the earthly sense—how the seed of the future that
belongs to the time after death, yet exists in us as a result of the
will, is permeated by love and affinity. Likewise, in education,
6. Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), German philosopher and educator.

He tutored in Switzerland, where he became interested in Pestalozzi’s pedagogical
methods. He developed a general metaphysical theory of pluralistic realism (with
implications especially for psychology) that rejected notions of faculties and
innate ideas and constructed a theory on which to base a pedagogy similar to
that of Pestalozzi. Major works include Alligemeine Padagogik (1806); Psychologie
als Wissenschaft, neu gemeine Metaphysik (1829).
Lecture Two 29
we must watch everything in an especially loving way, so that it

can be arrested or cultivated properly. We must assist children
in their affinity by appealing to the will. What will the true
impulse for an education of the will have to be? That impulse
can only be the affinity we must develop toward the child. As
that affinity develops toward our students, our educational
methods will improve.
Because educating the thinking is the opposite of educating
the will, since it is permeated with aversion, you might ask
whether we should develop aversions when we educate the
thinking intellect of students? Yes, indeed, but you must
understand it correctly. Place your aversions on the proper
foundation. You must try to understand the students them-
selves if you want to properly educate their thinking capacity.
Such understanding contains within it an element of aversion,
since it belongs at this end of the scale. By comprehending
your students and endeavoring to penetrate all their nuances,
you become the teacher of their understanding, their faculty of
knowledge. The aversions exist in this very activity, but you
make the aversion good by educating your students.
Furthermore, you can be certain that we are not led to meet
one another in this life if there are no preconditions for such a
meeting. These external processes are always the outer expres-
sion of something inner, regardless of how strange this may
seem to a conventional worldview. The fact that you are present
to teach these children from the Waldorf factory, and the fact
that you will do what is necessary in this regard, indicates that
this group of teachers and this group of children belong
together in terms of karma. You become the appropriate teacher
for these children because in previous times you developed aver-
sions toward them. Now you free yourself from these aversions
by educating their thinking. And we develop affinities in the
right way by aiding the appropriate development of the will.
Be very clear about this; you can best penetrate the twofold
human being as discussed in our seminar. But you must try to
understand every aspect of the human being. Through what we
attempted in the seminars, you will become a good educator of
only the children’s thinking.7 For the will life, you will be a
good educator by trying to surround each individual with real
affinity. These things belong to education: aversion enables us
to comprehend, and affinity enables us to love. Since our bod-
ies have centers where affinity and aversion meet, this affects
our social interaction as expressed in the process of teaching. I
ask you to think this through and take it into your feelings so
that we can continue tomorrow.
7. They discussed ways of dealing with children in terms of their temperaments;

on the twofold human being and the four temperaments, see discussion 1 in Dis-
cussions with Teachers; this discussion is also included in Rhythms of Learning
(Roberto Trostli, ed.) as “Understanding Children’s Temperaments”; also see
Rudolf Steiner’s “Four Temperaments” in Rhythms of Learning and in Anthroposo-
phy in Everyday Life.
Lecture Three
AUGUST 23, 1919
Yesterday I pointed out that our teaching should begin with a

formative, artistic quality, so that the whole being of the chil-
dren, especially the will, can be stimulated by the lessons.1 Our
discussions here will help you understand how important such
procedures are. And they will help you understand that we
must always be aware of the fact that there is something dead
in the human being—something dying that must be trans-
formed and brought to new life.
When we approach beings of nature and the world as a
whole merely as passive viewers, with an understanding that
works only in mental representations, we exist more within a
dying process. But when we approach beings of nature and the
world through the will, we exist within an enlivening process.
As educators, therefore, our task is to constantly enliven what is
dead and prevent what approaches death from dying entirely in
the human being. Indeed, we must fructify that dying with the
enlivening element developed through the will. Consequently,
when the children are young, we should not be afraid to intro-
duce an artistic form into our lessons from the very beginning.
Everything artistic that approaches humankind divides into
two streams: the stream of sculpture and images and the stream
of music and poetry. These two artistic streams are really polar
1. Steiner is referring to lecture 1 in this course.

opposites, but there is also a real capacity for synthesis to higher

unity precisely because of this polarity. You surely realize that
this duality in the artistic realm finds expression even in the
world’s evolution of the races. You need only recall certain writ-
ings of Heinrich Heine.2 This will direct your attention toward
a certain duality—everything that has arisen from the being of
the Greeks in the way most suited to them, in the most exalted
sense, has a tendency toward sculpture and images, and all that
emanates from the Jewish people tends toward music. Conse-
quently, we find these two streams divided, even racially, and
those who are open to such observations will not find it difficult
to follow this thinking in the history of art.
Of course, there are always efforts—justifiably so—to unite
the musical with the sculptural and pictorial. However, the
only way they can be completely united is in eurythmy, once it
has been fully developed so that the musical and the visible
become one. I am not referring, of course, to the beginnings of
eurythmy as we are working with it now, but to what must
eventually exist in eurythmy. We must, then, consider the fact
that within the totality of harmonious human nature, there is a
sculptural, pictorial element toward which the human will
tends. What is the proper characterization of this human ten-
dency to become sculptural and pictorial?
If we were beings of understanding only, if we were able to
observe the world only through our mental representations, we
would eventually become walking dead—we would present the
image of dying beings on earth. We save ourselves from this
2. Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), German lyric poet, satirist, and publicist (lived
in Paris after 1831). Owing to an incurable spinal disease, he was confined to
bed in 1848. His verse transcended Romanticism and began to express a more
modern temperament, containing political and social criticism notable for its
sardonic wit and arrogant radicalism. His volumes of verse contain some of the
best-loved German lyrics, many set to music by Schumann and Schubert.
Lecture Three 33
mortality only by feeling in ourselves the urge to enliven what

is dying in concepts through sculptural and pictorial imagina-
tion. If you wish to be true educators, you must be on your
guard against making everything abstractly uniform. Do not
allow yourselves to say that we should not develop the death
processes in the human being—that we should avoid training
the conceptual realm of ideas in the children. This mistake in
the realm of the soul and spirit is like that of a doctor who
observes cultural evolution and then announces, as though he
is a great teacher, that bones are a dying part of human beings.
Therefore, he says, let us guard people against this dying ele-
ment by keeping the bones soft and lively. If physicians acted
on such an opinion, it would lead to a world of rickety people
unable to fulfill their tasks.
It is always incorrect to speak as many theosophists and
anthroposophists do about Ahriman and Lucifer and their
influence on human evolution, saying that they harm human
nature and must be guarded against. This would eventually
exclude human beings from everything that should constitute
humanity. We should not avoid educating the conceptual,
thinking element. We must educate it, but we must also never
fail at other times to approach the nature of the child through
the elements of sculpture and image; unity arises out of this.
Unity does not arise by extinguishing one element, but by
developing both sides. People today cannot yet think in this
way about unity. This is why they find it so difficult to under-
stand the threefold arrangement of society.3 It is entirely appro-
priate in society that the spiritual, economic, and legal spheres
exist side by side; this is how unity comes about, instead of
being constructed abstractly. Imagine what it would mean for
3. See Rudolf Steiner, Social Issues: Meditative Thinking & the Threefold Social
Order; and Towards Social Renewal: Basic Issues of the Social Question.
people to say that because the head is a unity, as is the rest of

the body, the human being should not really exist as such—
that the head should be formed separately from the rest of the
human being and be allowed to move about on its own in the
world. We follow the creativity of nature only by allowing the
whole to arise from all the independent parts.
It is a matter of developing on the one side mental, concep-
tual education and, on the other, the element of sculpture and
image, which enlivens what is developed in the conceptual. We
live in an age that always attempts to destroy consciousness, so
we are concerned with raising these things into our awareness
without losing our innocence. We need not lose it if we avoid
becoming abstract and establish things in a concrete way. It
would be very good in every way if we could, for example,
begin at the earliest possible point with the sculptural and pic-
torial element, letting children live in the world of color. Like-
wise it would be beneficial if we as teachers would steep
ourselves in what Goethe presents in the instructive part of his
Theory of Color.4 It is based on the way he always permeates
every color with a nuance of feeling. Consequently, he empha-
sizes the challenging nature of red; he stresses not only what the
eye sees but also what the soul feels in red. Similarly, he empha-
sizes how the soul feels the stillness and absorption of blue. It is
possible, without piercing children’s innocence, to lead them
into the realm of color so that the feeling nuances of the world
of color emerge in a living way. Although at first the result is a
great mess, it provides a good opportunity to train the children
to be less messy.
4. A Theory of Colors, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1970. Johann Wolfgang van
Goethe (1749–1832); during the late 1800s, Rudolf Steiner was an editor at the
Goethe archives in Weimar; his introductions to Goethe’s works are collected in
Nature’s Open Secret: Introductions to Goethe’s Scientific Writings.
Lecture Three 35
We should introduce children to color as early as possible,

and it is helpful to let them use colored paints on both colored
and white surfaces. We should also endeavor to awaken in chil-
dren the feelings that can arise only from a spiritual scientific
perspective of the world of color.5 Working as I did with
friends in the small dome of the Goetheanum can provide a liv-
ing relationship to color.6 One discovers when using blue, for
example, that within blue itself there is a characterization of the
whole realm of inner absorption. So if we want to paint an
angel moved by inner absorption, we instantly have an urge to
use blue, since the nuances of blue, the light and dark of blue,
evoke in the soul a feeling of movement arising from the soul
element. A bright orange evokes in the soul a sensation of shin-
ing and outer revelation. Therefore, if we want an effect that is
aggressive or an exhortation, if the angel wants to speak to us,
wants to emerge from the background and speak, then we
express this with bright orange nuances. It is perfectly possible
in an elementary way to show children this inherent liveliness
of colors.
Next we must become very certain in ourselves that plain
drawing has something false about it. The truest of all is the
feeling that comes from color itself; somewhat untrue is the
feeling that comes from shades of light and dark; and the least
true is drawing. Drawing as such, in fact, approaches the
abstract element in nature as something that is dying. Indeed,
we should always draw in such a way that we become aware of
drawing essentially what is dead. When we paint with colors,
we should do it in such a way that it makes us aware that we are
5. See Steiner’s lectures in Colour.

6. See Rudolf Steiner’s lecture, “The Building at Dornach,” in Art as Spiritual
Activity: Rudolf Steiner’s Contribution to the Visual Arts, Michael Howard, ed.;
also Steiner’s Architecture as a Synthesis of the Arts (includes Ways to a New Style of
Architecture).
invoking the living out of what is dead. After all, what is the
line of a horizon?
If we simply take a pencil and draw a horizon, it is an

abstract, deathly untruth against nature that always has two
streams: the dead and the living. We merely cut off one of the
streams and say that this is nature. If, on the other hand, I say
that I can see something green and something blue that are
adjacent but separate, then the line of the horizon appears
where the two colors meet, and then I am saying something
that is true.
blue
green
In this way you gradually come to appreciate that the forms

of nature really arise from the colors, and that drawing is
therefore a process of abstraction. We should create in growing
children a good mental picture and feeling for such things
because this quickens the whole soul, creating for it a proper
relationship with the outer world. Our culture has become
sick because we lack a proper relationship with the external
world. In teaching this way, we do not need to become one-
sided. It would, for example, be valuable gradually to develop
the possibility of moving from purely abstract artistic work,
such as a person creates out of delight in beauty, to a concrete
art or artistic craft.
Lecture Three 37
People today urgently need crafts that are truly artistic and
can find a place in our broader culture. During the nineteenth
century, we reached the point where furniture was made merely
to appear pleasing. For example, a chair was made to delight
the eye, whereas a chair’s inherent character should be felt
when we sit on it, and this should determine the chair’s form. It
should not merely be beautiful; it should invite us to feel our
way into it and should have an inherent character that makes it
suitable for sitting. The way the arms are attached to a chair
and so on should express an integration with even a cultivated
sense of touch; a person wants to be supported by the chair.
We would do modern culture a great service by introducing
artistic craft classes into education. Those of us who want the
best for humankind become tremendously anxious about our
culture today when we see, for example, the way abstractions
and the primitive ideas of those with socialistic tendencies
threaten to flood our culture (which will not happen if we attain
our goals). We would no longer find beauty in our civilization,
but only what has utility. Even when people dream of beauty,
there is no feeling of the urgent need to stress the necessity of
beauty as we drift toward socialism. This must be recognized.
We should not be sparing with the sculptural and imagistic
aspect in our classes. Likewise, we should not spare any effort
in creating real feeling for the dynamic element expressed in
architecture. It will be very easy to erroneously approach the
children with certain aspects too early. But, in fact, in some
ways, it’s all right when this happens. I was asked to say a few
words to eighty children from Munich. They have been
spending their holidays in Dornach, where Ms. Kisseleff gave
them twelve eurythmy lessons.7 They demonstrated what they
7. Tatjana Kisseleff (1881–1970), eurythmy teacher at the Goetheanum from

1914 to 1927, then performance eurythmist at the Goetheanum.
had learned to some of their teachers and anthroposophists

from Dornach. The children were very sharp, and after the
performance (which included presentations by our Dornach
eurythmists) they crowded around and asked whether I liked
their performance. They really wanted to perform well; the
whole occasion was very heartwarming.
The people who arranged the event had asked me to say a
few words to the children on the evening before they returned
to Munich. I said, “What I am going to say you will not under-
stand now, but you will understand it later. Be alert in the
future when you hear the word soul, since you cannot under-
stand it yet.” It is extremely important to point out things in
this way—things that children do not understand yet. One of
today’s primary principles effectively says that one should teach
children only what they can understand; this is wrong. Such a
principle deadens all education. Education comes to life only
when children can take in what they are given, carry it for a
while in their depths, and then bring it back to the surface
later. This is most important for educating children between
six and fourteen years of age. Much can be allowed to trickle
into their souls that will not be understood until later. Please
do not have the feeling that you are wrong to overreach chil-
dren’s maturity by mentioning what they will understand only
later on. The opposite principle has brought a somewhat dead-
ening quality into our school systems.
Children, however, must be made aware that they will have to
wait. You can awaken them to the feeling that they must wait
until they have the capacity to understand what they are absorb-
ing. In this sense, it was not necessarily bad when, in the past,
children were made to learn by rote—1 x 1 = 1; 2 x 2 = 4; 3 x 3
= 9; and so on—instead of learning as they do today with the
help of a calculator. We need to break through this principle of
holding back the child’s understanding. This should, of course,
Lecture Three 39
be done with the necessary tact, since we must not distance

ourselves from what children can love; yet they can be perme-
ated, merely through the authority of the teacher, with much
that they will be unable to understand until later. When you
bring the elements of sculpture and image to children in this
way, you will find that you can enliven much of what otherwise
has a deadening effect.
The musical element—which is inherently an element of the
will that carries life—lives in us from birth and, as I said earlier,
is expressed especially during the third and fourth years as an
inclination to dance. Although this may sound odd, in the way
this element expresses itself in the child initially, it carries life
too strongly—it is too much of a shock and easily numbs
awareness. This strong musical element very easily brings about
a certain dazed state in the child’s development. We have to say
that the educational influence we exert through the musical
element must consist in creating a harmony of the Apollonian
element with the Dionysian element welling up out of the
human being’s nature. In the same way that the deadening
influence must be enlivened by the sculptural, pictorial ele-
ment, something that is intensely alive in the musical element
has to be damped down so that it does not affect the human
being too strongly. This is the feeling with which we ought to
teach music to the children.
We must recognize that, through the workings of karma, a
person’s nature develops with a bias toward one side or
another. This bias is particularly noticeable in connection with
the musical element, but I would point out that it is overly
emphasized. We should not lay too much stress on the notion
that one child is musical and another is not. Differences do
exist, but to take them to their ultimate conclusion, to exclude
the unmusical child from everything musical and give musical
education only to children with musical inclinations, is most
definitely wrong. Even the most unmusical children must at

least be present for any performance of music. It is right, of
course, that as far as musical performances are concerned,
increasingly only those children who are really musical will par-
ticipate. But the unmusical children should always be present,
and their receptivity to music should be developed; you will
notice that even the most unmusical child has a trace of musi-
cal talent that is merely deeply buried and can be brought to
light only by a loving approach. This should never be
neglected, for it is far truer than we imagine that, in Shakes-
peare’s words, “The man that hath no music in himself, / nor is
not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / is fit for treasons,
stratagems, and spoils ... / let no such man be trusted!”8 This is
a fundamental truth, and, for this reason, no effort should be
spared in bringing the musical element even to those children
who are considered at first to be unmusical.
It is of the greatest importance, particularly with respect to
the social life, to foster music in an elementary way by teaching
the children directly out of the musical facts, without recourse
to confusing and abstract theories. The children should gain a
clear idea of elementary music, of harmonies, melodies, and so
on, through the study of basic facts, through analyzing melodies
and harmonies by ear. In this way, we build up the whole artistic
realm of music in the same simple fashion as we do the sculp-
tural, pictorial realm, where we similarly begin with the details.
This method will help mitigate the amateurishness that plays
8. The Merchant of Venice, act 5, scene 1; in full:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with the concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.
Lecture Three 41
such a major role in music. It cannot be denied that musical

dilettantism serves a certain purpose in the social life of the
community; without it we would not progress particularly
well. But it should be confined to the listeners. If this aim
were to be achieved, it would be possible for those who per-
form and compose music to gain proper recognition within
our social order.
We should not forget that everything in the sculptural, pic-
torial realm works toward nurturing the distinct, unique nature
of the human being, while all that is musical and poetical fos-
ters our social life. Human beings are brought together as one
through music and poetry; they become individuals through
sculpture and painting. The sculptural, pictorial element sup-
ports the individuality, and people’s living and intermingling in
community through music and poetry sustain society. Poetry is
conceived exclusively out of the solitude of the soul, and it is
comprehended through the community of humankind. It is
entirely accurate, not at all abstract, to assert that a person
reveals their inner being through poetry and that, in taking in
the created work, another individual meets it with their own
deepest inner being. For this reason, a delight in music and
poetry, and also a yearning for them, should be encouraged in
the growing child.
A child should come to know what is truly poetical early in
life. Today we grow up into a social order in which we are tyr-
annized by the prose element of speech. Countless reciters
intimidate people by emphasizing the prose element in poetry,
in other words, merely the actual meaning. When a poem is
presented in a manner that gives pride of place to the nuances
of content, it is regarded as faultless recitation. Truly perfect
recitation, however, stresses the musical element. In the intro-
ductions I sometimes give to eurythmy performances, I have
pointed out how, with a poet such as Schiller, a poem emerges
from the depths of the soul.9 With many of his poems an

undefined melody first predominated in his soul, and he only
later immersed the content, or the actual words, into the unde-
fined melody. The content is suspended in the general melody,
and the creative poetic activity comes into play in forming the
language, not the content, forming the beat, the rhythm, the
rhyme—the musical element on which poetry is based.
I said that people are coerced by the modern method of reci-
tation because it is always an act of coercion to place the main
emphasis on the prose, the content of a poem considered quite
abstractly. In spiritual science we can overcome this tendency
only by depicting a subject from the most varied viewpoints, as
I always try to do. In this way, our concepts remain artistically
fluid. It gave me particular pleasure to be told one day by one
of our artistically gifted friends that some of the lecture cycles I
have given could be transcribed into symphonies purely on the
basis of their inner structure. Some of the courses indeed evoke
a musical quality in their form. Consider, for example, the
course given in Vienna on life between death and a new
birth.10 You will see that you could make a symphony of it.
This is possible because a lecture concerning spiritual science
should not intimidate but should instead arouse people’s will.
Yet when people encounter an idea like the threefold social
order, they say that it is incomprehensible. It is not incompre-
hensible; it is only that they are unaccustomed to the manner
9. See chapter 3 in An Introduction to Eurythmy. Johann Christoph Friedrich von

Schiller (1759–1805), German poet, playwright, as well as a surgeon while in the
military. After his arrest by the Duke of Württemberg, he was allowed to publish
only medical works. His “An die Freunde” was used by Beethoven in his Ninth
Symphony. His friendship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich
Hölderlin helped to inspire Schiller as a poet.
10. April 6–14, 1914, The Inner Nature of Man and Our Life between Death and
Rebirth.
Lecture Three 43
of its presentation. This is why it is exceedingly important to

draw the child’s attention to the musical element on which
every poem is founded.
The lessons in a school should be arranged in a way that
allows recitation to be closely connected to the musical ele-
ment. The music teacher should be in close contact with the
teacher of recitation so that instruction in one subject follows
directly on instruction in the other and so that a living relation-
ship between the two is established. It would be particularly
useful if the music and recitation teachers could work together
in the classroom, so that each could point out the links
between the two subjects. This would be one way to eliminate
a truly dreadful teaching method that is still very much preva-
lent in our schools—the abstract explanation of poems. This
abstract explanation of poetry, verging almost on grammatical
dissection, spells the death of everything that ought to work on
the child. Interpretation of poems is quite appalling.
You will protest that interpretation is necessary if the chil-
dren are to understand the poem. I would counter that all the
lessons must be structured to form a totality. This has to be dis-
cussed in the weekly meetings of the teachers. If a poem is to be
recited, then the other lessons must encompass whatever might
be necessary to shed light on the poem. The teachers must
properly prepare the children to bring to the recitation lesson
whatever they need to help them understand the poem. If, for
instance, the children are to recite Schiller’s “Der Spaziergang,”
the cultural, historical, and psychological aspects of the poem
can quite easily be presented to the children, not by going
through the poem line by line but simply by telling them what-
ever they need to know about the content. The recitation les-
son itself must focus on the artistic presentation.
If we were to bring the two streams of art together in this way
to harmonize human nature through and through, we should
indeed achieve a great deal. Consider only that an infinitely

important advance in human beings’ harmony with the world
is achieved when they sing. Singing is a way of reproducing
what is already present in the world. When human beings sing,
they express the momentous wisdom out of which the world is
built. Likewise, we must not forget that in singing the cosmic
element of the actual sequence of notes is linked with human
speech. This brings an unnatural element into singing. We can
perceive it even in the incompatibility of the sound of a poem
with its content. It would be a step in the right direction if we
could further develop our considerations of poetry by reciting
each line and enlivening only the rhyming word with melody,
so that the line flows along in recitation and the rhyming word
is sung like an aria. This would ensure a clear distinction
between the intonation of a poem and the words, which actu-
ally disturb the musical part of human beings.
When the musical ear of human beings is cultivated, they are
inspired to experience in a living way the musical essence of the
world itself. This is of the utmost value for the developing indi-
vidual. We must not forget that in the sculptural, pictorial realm
we look at beauty, we experience it in a living way, whereas in
the musical realm we ourselves become beauty. This is extraor-
dinarily significant. The further you look back to ancient times,
the less you find anything that we call musical. We have the dis-
tinct impression that music is still evolving, even though some
musical forms are already dying out. This is rooted in a most
significant cosmic fact. In all sculptural and pictorial art the
human being is the imitator of the old celestial order. The high-
est form of imitation of the cosmic celestial order is the repre-
sentation of the world in sculpture or painting.
In music, on the other hand, the human being is the creator.
The human being does not re-create something that already
exists but lays the firm foundation for what is to arise in the
Lecture Three 45
future. Of course, simply imitating in music the sighing of the

waves or the singing of the nightingale can produce a certain
musicality. But all true music and poetry are new creations, and
it is out of this act of creating anew that the Jupiter, Venus, and
Vulcan evolutions of the world will arise. Through music we
rescue in some way what still has to transpire; we rescue it out
of the present nullity of its existence and give it life.
Not until we link ourselves in this way to the great facts of
the universe do we gain a genuine understanding of the nature
of teaching. Only on the basis of such an understanding can
the appropriate attitude of solemnity emerge so that teaching
really becomes a kind of service to God, a consecrated act.
What I present to you will become more or less an ideal, but
surely what we put into practice can embrace the ideal. For
instance, when we take our students into the mountains or
the fields, out into nature (which we shall certainly do), we
must not neglect a certain fact. We must always remember
that lessons on natural science have their proper place only
inside the classroom, as opposed to outside in nature. Let us
assume that we step with the children out into nature, where
we draw their attention to a stone or a flower. In doing so we
should strictly avoid any allusion to what we teach inside the
classroom. In natural surroundings we should draw the chil-
dren’s attention to nature in a way that is totally different from
the method we use in the classroom. We should never forget
to point out to them that we take them out into the open air
so that they can experience the beauty of nature and we bring
the products of nature into the classroom so that we can dis-
sect and analyze nature.
We should never speak to the children out of doors about
what we show them indoors, for instance plants. We should
emphasize how different it is to dissect dead nature in the
classroom and to look upon the beauty of nature outdoors. We
should compare these two experiences. It is not appropriate to

take the children outside into nature in order to use natural
objects to exemplify what we have taught them in the class-
room. We should seek to arouse in children a different kind of
feeling, the feeling that it is unfortunate that we have to dissect
nature when we bring it into the classroom. But the children
should nevertheless understand this as a necessity, for the
destruction of what is natural is necessary in the building up of
the human being. We should certainly not imagine that we are
doing any good by giving a scientific explanation of a beetle
out of doors in natural surroundings. The scientific description
of the beetle belongs in the classroom. When we take the chil-
dren out into the open we have to arouse in them delight at the
sight of the beetle, delight in the way he runs about and in his
drollness, delight in his relationship to the rest of nature. Fur-
thermore, we should not neglect to call forth in the child’s soul
a clear sense of how a creative element lives in music, tran-
scending nature, and of how the human being shares in the cre-
ation of nature in creating music. This feeling will take shape
only very primitively, of course, but it will be the first feeling
that must emerge from the will element of music—that the
human being feels an integral part of the cosmos.
Lecture Four
AUGUST 25, 1919
Building on the ideas we just discussed in our session on gen-

eral education, I would like to start with a detail of method
that is exceedingly important. This detail is also related to our
recent discussions of various teaching methods.1
You must regard the first lesson you have with your students
in every class as extremely significant. In a certain sense a far
more important element will emanate from this first lesson
than from all the others. Of course, the other lessons will then
have to be turned to account—so that the substance arising in
the first lesson becomes fruitful for all the others. Let us imag-
ine in practical terms how we shall shape the very first lesson,
for soon you will be making the acquaintance of the children,
who will bring with them the consequences of every kind of
upbringing, both good and bad. Naturally I can make only
general suggestions here, which you will be able to develop fur-
ther. The point is that you will not have to follow the mis-
guided educational principles that have been prevalent lately;
you must concern yourselves with whatever has genuine signif-
icance for the child’s development.
You are faced, then, with a class of all sorts of children. The
first thing to do is to draw their attention to the reason they
1. See first four discussions in Discussions with Teachers and lecture 4 in The
Foundations of Human Experience.
are there in the classroom. It is very important that you should

speak to the children somewhat in this vein: “You have come
to school, and now I am going to tell you why you have come
to school.” This act of coming to school should immediately
be drawn to their attention. “You have come to school in order
to learn something. You have as yet no idea of all the things
you will be learning in school, but there will be all sorts of
subjects that you will have to learn. Why will you have to
learn all sorts of different things in school? You no doubt
know some adults, some grown-up people, and you must have
noticed that they can do things that you cannot do. You are
here so that one day you will also be able to do what
grown-ups can do. One day you will be able to do things that
you cannot do yet.” It is most important to work through this
network of thoughts with the children. And these thoughts
lead on to yet another matter.
No teaching can flow in the right channels unless it is accom-
panied by a certain respect for the previous generation. This
nuance must remain in the realm of feeling and sensing, but we
must nevertheless cultivate in the children, by every means,
respect and reverence, with which they look up to the achieve-
ments of former generations and to what they are also meant to
achieve by going to school. We must from the start arouse in
the children this way of regarding the culture around them with
a certain respect, so that they see those people who are older as
somewhat higher beings. If this feeling is not kindled, there will
be no progress in teaching and education. Similarly, no progress
can be made if we do not bring to consciousness in the chil-
dren’s souls what they can expect. Proceed to reflect with the
children, without hesitation, that you are looking beyond their
horizon. It does not matter, you see, if you say a great deal to
the children that they will understand only later. The principle
that dictates that you teach the children only what they can
Lecture Four 49
understand and form an opinion about has ruined much in our

culture.
The very well-known teacher of an even better known con-
temporary personality once boasted of having educated his
student according to the following principle. He said that he
had trained the boy well, for he had forced him always to
form an immediate opinion about everything. Many people
today agree with this principle of forming an opinion without
delay, and it is not remarkable that this teacher should stress
the wish to emphasize it in books on education. With regard
to this principle, I have come across the statement in a mod-
ern work on education that we can only hope to provide such
exemplary education for every German boy and girl. You will
gather from this notion that you can find in modern works on
education a great deal of what ought not to be done, for there
is a great tragedy in this kind of education, and this tragedy in
its turn is linked with the present world catastrophe.2
The point is not that children should immediately form
strong beliefs about everything, but that between their sev-
enth and fifteenth years they should learn out of love for their
teacher, out of a sense of the teacher’s authority. For this rea-
son, the suggested conversation with the children, which you
can expand on as you wish, should continue along the follow-
ing lines: “Look how grown-ups have books and can read. You
can’t read yet, but you will learn to read. When you have
learned how to read you will also be able to take books and
learn from them as grown-ups learn from them. Adults can
write letters to each other; in fact, they can write down any-
thing they like. Soon you will also be able to write letters,
because you will also learn to write. Besides reading and writ-
ing, grown-ups can also do arithmetic. You don’t yet know
2. The effects of World War I.

what doing arithmetic means. But you have to be able to do

arithmetic when you go out into life, for instance, if you want
to buy something to eat or to wear or if you want to make
something to wear.” This is the kind of conversation you must
have with the children. Then you say: “You will also learn to
calculate.” It is useful to draw the children’s attention to this
thought once and then, perhaps the next day, draw their
attention to it again, so that you repeat the idea a number of
times. It is vital to raise to consciousness what the children
will learn in this way.
It is most important in teaching to become aware (if I may
put it this way) of what otherwise remains a force of habit in
life. In contrast, there is no advantage in bringing all sorts of
things into the lesson simply for their own sake, even when it
seems to serve the lesson. You may hear someone recommend
that children should bring a box full of used matches to
school, so that they can be taught how to make patterns with
them. Of course, the matches should have a square shape if
possible, not round, so that they stay on the slanted desks.
Children may be taught, for example, how to arrange the
matches in the shape of a house and so on. Organizing
matches in this way is a favorite subject and generally recom-
mended for small children. But rather than offering any real
understanding of life, such lessons offer nothing but amuse-
ment; learning by arraying matchsticks in patterns means
nothing for inner human nature. Wherever such an activity
may lead, in later life people can consider it merely a form of
recreation. It is not beneficial to merely introduce play into
education. On the contrary, it is our task to bring the fullness
of life into education; we should not bring in things that are
no more than a diversion. Please do not misunderstand me. I
am not saying that play should not be used in education; I
mean that games artificially constructed for the lesson have no
Lecture Four 51
place in school. There will still be a great deal to say about

how play can be properly incorporated into the lessons.
How can we work effectively right from the start, particu-
larly in forming the will? The time will come to move on to
another matter once there have been enough discussions with
the children, as I have outlined—that is, discussions about
ways of helping children become more aware of why they come
to school and ways of helping them come to respect and
admire adults. Then it becomes useful to say something like,
“Look at yourselves. You have two hands, a left one and a right
one. These hands are for working; you can do all kinds of
things with them.” In this way, you also make them aware of
what concerns them as human beings. The children should not
just know that they have hands but become aware of their
hands. Naturally, you may be tempted to say that the children
are, of course, aware of having hands. But there is a subtle dif-
ference between knowing that they have hands with which to
work and never having that thought cross their minds.
Having spoken with the children about their hands and
about working with them, we then proceed to let them do
something skillful with their hands. This might even take place
in the very first lesson. You might say to them: “Watch me
draw this [drawing on left]. Now take your hand and draw it,
too. Then we let the children draw what we have drawn, as
slowly as possible.
Actually it will be a slow process if we call the children up one

by one to the blackboard, letting them make their mark on the
board and then return to their seats. The most important point
is that they should digest the lesson properly. Then you might
say to the children: “Now I am going to draw this [drawing on
right]. And you can use your hands to draw it too.” Each child
then draws this as well. When they have all finished, you say:
“This one is a straight line, and this one is a curved line; with
your hands you have just made a straight and a curved line.”
You can help the clumsier children, but you should see to it that
each child does it as perfectly as possible from the start.
Right from the start we let the children do something, and
we must make sure that in subsequent lessons this is repeated a
number of times. In the following lesson, for example, we let
the children make a straight line and then a curved line. Let us
consider a subtle distinction. You need at first attach no great
value to letting the children make a straight and a curved line
from memory; once again you first make the straight line on
the board and let the children copy it, and the same with the
curved line. Then you ask individual children: “What is
that?”—“A straight line.” “What is that?”—“A curved line.”
You use the principle of repetition by letting the children copy
the drawing and then, without repeating it yourself first, letting
them name it themselves. It is most important to use this subtle
nuance. You must make great efforts to cultivate the habit of
doing the right things in front of the children; the educational
maxims you believe in must become second nature to you.
You need not hesitate quite early on to take out a box of
paints and set a glass of water beside it (indeed, it is a good idea
to conduct such lessons quite soon with the children). After you
have pinned white paper to the blackboard with drawing tacks,
you take up a brush, dip it in the water and then into the paint,
and make a small yellow patch on the white surface. When you
Lecture Four 53
have finished, you let each child come to the blackboard and
make a similar small patch. Each patch must be separate from
the others so that in the end you have several yellow patches.
Then you dip your brush into the blue paint and put blue next
to your yellow patch. And you let the children come up and
put on the blue in the same way. When about half of them
have done this, you say: “Now we shall do something else; I am
going to dip my brush in the green paint and put green next to
the other yellow patches.” Avoiding as well as you can making
them jealous of one another, you let the remaining children put
on the green in the same way. All this will take time, and the
children will digest it well. It is indeed essential to proceed very
slowly, taking only a very few small steps in the lesson. The
time then comes for you to say: “I am going to tell you some-
thing that you will not yet understand very well, but one day
you will understand it quite well. What we did at the top,
where we put blue next to the yellow, is more beautiful than
what we did at the bottom, where we put green next to the yel-
low.” This will sink deeply into the children’s souls. It will be
necessary to return to this thought several times, but they will
also puzzle away at it themselves. They will not be entirely
indifferent to it but will learn to understand quite well from
simple, naïve examples how to feel the difference between
something beautiful and something less beautiful.
A similar method can be used when you introduce music
into the lesson. It is good here, too, to start with one note or
another. There is no need to tell the children the name of the
note. You simply strike the note in some way. Then let the chil-
dren strike the note, too, so that here you also bring the will
element into the lesson. Afterward, you strike a second, con-
cordant note and then allow a number of the children to strike
it too. The next step is to strike a note followed by a discordant
note and again have the children do the same. Just as you did
with the colors, you try to awaken in the children a feeling for
the concordance and discordance of notes. You do not talk to
them about concordance and discordance but speak of the
beautiful and the less beautiful, thus appealing to their feelings.
These examples, and not the letters of the alphabet, are the
proper starting points for the early lessons.
Let us turn our attention to the class teacher. The class
teacher will hold with the children the conversations I have just
described. Perhaps the musical element will have to be treated
separately and introduced to the children in another lesson. It
will then be beneficial for the music teacher to conduct a simi-
lar conversation, though oriented more toward the musical,
and to go over the same ground more than once. In this way,
the children will discover that the same lessons are repeated by
one teacher after the other, so that they will find that they are
learning the same from both teachers. This method will help
give the school a more unified and cooperative character. In
their weekly meetings the teachers should discuss these lessons
so as to instill a certain unity in them.
Only when you have taught the children in this way to use
their hands and ears is the time ripe for progressing to the first
elements of reading, in particular reading handwriting. (We
shall pay greater attention to the details later. Today, in this pre-
paratory talk, I want to suggest the points of view according to
which we can proceed, rather than pedantically examining one
aspect after another.) With respect to method, it will have had
an extraordinarily good effect on the children to have spoken
to them as early as the first lesson about writing, reading, and
arithmetic and about how they cannot do these things yet but
will learn them all in school. As a result of this discussion, a
certain hope, wish, and resolve will form in the children, and
through what you yourself do, they will find their way into a
world of feeling that, in turn, acts as an incentive to the realm
Lecture Four 55
of the will. As an educational measure you do not present the

children directly with what you want to teach them; instead,
you leave them for a while in a state of expectation. This has an
extraordinarily positive effect on the development of the will in
the growing human being.
Before delving into these matters in more detail, I want to
dispel certain ideas you may have that could cause confusion. So
many sins have been committed through the prevailing meth-
ods of learning reading and writing, especially in teaching what
is connected with learning to read and write, that is, language,
grammar, syntax, and so on. There has been so much wayward-
ness in this area that there are doubtless few people who do not
remember with some horror the lessons they had in grammar
and syntax. This horror is quite justified. We should not con-
clude, however, that learning grammar is useless and should be
gotten rid of. This would be a completely erroneous idea. In
seeking to find what is right by going from one extreme to the
other, it might be natural enough to come up with the idea that
we should do away with grammar. Let’s teach the children to
read by the practical method of selecting passages for them; let’s
teach them to read and write without any grammar. This idea
could arise quite easily out of the horror that so many of us
remember. But learning grammar is not an unnecessary prac-
tice, especially in our day and age. I will tell you why.
What do we do when we raise unconscious speech to the
grammatical realm, to the knowledge of grammar? We make a
transition with our students: We lift speech from the uncon-
scious into the conscious realm. Our purpose is not to teach
them grammar in a pedantic way but to raise something to
consciousness that otherwise takes place unconsciously.
Unconsciously or semiconsciously, human beings do indeed
use the world as a ladder up which to climb in a manner that
corresponds to what we learn in grammar. Grammar tells us,
for instance, that there are nouns. Nouns are names for objects,
for objects that in a sense are self-contained in space. It is not
without significance for us that we find such objects in life. All
things that can be expressed by nouns awaken us to the con-
sciousness of our independence as human beings. By learning to
name things with nouns, we distinguish ourselves from the
world around us. By calling a thing a table or a chair, we separate
ourselves from the table or chair; we are here, and the table or
chair is there.
It is quite another matter to describe things using adjectives.
When I say, “The chair is blue,” I am expressing a quality that
unites me with the chair. The characteristic that I perceive
unites me with the chair. By naming an object with a noun, I
dissociate myself from it; when I describe it with an adjective I
become one with it again. The development of our conscious-
ness takes place in our relationship to things when we address
them; we must certainly become conscious of the way we
address them. If I say a verb—for example, “A woman
writes”—I not only unite with the being in relation to whom I
used the verb, I also do with her what she is doing with her
physical body. I do what she does—my I-being does what she
does. When I speak a verb, my I joins in with what the physical
body of the other is doing. I unite my I with the physical body
of the other when I use a verb. Our listening, especially with
verbs, is in reality always a form of participation. What is at
this time the most spiritual part of the human being partici-
pates; it simply suppresses the activity.
Only in eurythmy is this activity placed in the external
world. In addition to all its other benefits, eurythmy also acti-
vates listening. When one person says something, the other lis-
tens; he engages in his I with what lives physically in the
sounds, but he suppresses it. The I always participates in
eurythmy, and what eurythmy puts before us through the phys-
Lecture Four 57
ical body is nothing other than listening made visible. You

always do eurythmy when you listen, and when you actually
perform eurythmy you are just making visible what remains
invisible when you listen. The manifestation of the activity of
the listening human being is, in fact, eurythmy. It is not some-
thing arbitrary, but rather the revelation of the activity of the
listening human being. People today are, of course, shockingly
slovenly; at first, when they listen, they do very poor inner
eurythmy. By engaging in it as they should, they raise it to the
level of true eurythmy.
Through eurythmy people can learn to listen effectively,
which they are presently unable to do. I have made certain
unusual discoveries in my recent lectures.3 Speakers come for-
ward during discussions, but from what they have to say, one
quickly notices that they really never heard the lecture, not
even in a physical sense; they heard only certain parts of it.
This is enormously significant, particularly in the present era of
our human development. Someone enters into the discussion
and says whatever he or she has been used to thinking for
decades. You find yourself speaking in front of people with
socialist ideas, but they will hear only what they have always
heard from certain activists; the rest is not heard even in the
physical sense. Sometimes they innocently admit as much by
saying, “Dr. Steiner says a lot of good things, but he never says
anything new.” People have become so rigid in their listening
that they become confused about anything that has not already
fossilized gradually within them. People cannot listen and will
become increasingly less able to do so in our age, unless the
power of listening can be reawakened by eurythmy.
3. This refers to Steiner’s experiences while lecturing on his proposed “threefold

social order”; see, for example, Guenther Wachsmuth, The Life and Work of
Rudolf Steiner, pp. 354–361.
The human soul being must find healing again. It will be par-
ticularly important in school to supplement the healthy qualities
provided by gymnastics, which benefits the body and everything
that takes account only of the physiology of bodily functions.
The other important factor is the health of the soul: To provide
benefits for the soul requires that gymnastics lessons alternate
with eurythmy lessons. Although eurythmy is primarily an art,
its health-giving forces will be especially salutary to the students.
In eurythmy they will not simply learn something artistic;
through eurythmy they will derive the same benefits for their
soul as they derive through gymnastics for their body. The way
these two disciplines complement each other will be very helpful.
It is essential to educate our children in a way that will
enable them once again to notice the world around them and
their fellow human beings. This is the foundation of all social
life. Everyone talks today of social impulses, yet nothing but
antisocial urges are to be found among people. Socialism ought
to have its roots in the new esteem human beings should gain
for one another. But there can be mutual esteem only when
people really listen to each other. If we are to become teachers
and educators, it will be vastly important that we become
attentive to these matters once more.
Now that you know that when you say a noun you dissociate
yourself from your environment, when you say an adjective you
unite yourself with your surroundings, and when you say a verb
you blossom out into your environment and move with it, you
will speak with quite a different inner emphasis about the noun,
the adjective, and the verb than you would if you were not aware
of these facts. All this is still only a preliminary discussion and
will be continued later. For the moment, I merely want to evoke
certain ideas, the absence of which might lead to confusion.
It is extraordinarily important for us to know what it means
for a person to become conscious of the structure of language.
Lecture Four 59
In addition, we must develop a feeling for the great wisdom in

language. This feeling, too, has all but died out today. Lan-
guage is far cleverer than any of us. You will surely believe me
when I say that the structure of language has not been formed
by human beings. Just imagine what would have been the
result if people had sat in parliaments in order to decree, in
their cleverness, the structure of language. It would result in
something about as clever as our laws. The structure of lan-
guage, however, is truly more clever than our statutory laws.
Inherent in the structure of language is the greatest wisdom.
And an extraordinary amount can be learned from the way a
people or a tribe speaks. Entering consciously in a living way
into the framework of language, we can learn a very great deal
from the genius of language itself.
It is extremely important to learn how to feel something defi-
nite in the activity of the spirits of language. To believe that the
genius of language works in the structure of language is of great
significance. This feeling can be extended further, to the point
where we realize that we human beings speak, but animals can-
not yet speak; they have at most the beginnings of articulated
speech. In our day and age, when people like to confuse every-
thing, speech is ascribed even to ants and bees. But in the light
of reality this is nonsense. It is all built on a form of judgment to
which I have frequently drawn attention.
There are some natural philosophers today who consider
themselves most wise and say, “Why should not plants, too,
have a will life and a feeling life? Are there not plants, the
so-called carnivorous plants, that attract small animals that fly
near them and then snap shut on them when they have settled?”
These are beings that seem to have a will relationship with
whatever comes into their vicinity, but we cannot claim that
such outward signs are really characteristics of will. When I
meet this attitude of mind, I usually use the same form of logic
and say: “I know of something that also waits till a live creature
comes near it and then encloses and imprisons it—a mouse-
trap.” The mere workings of a mousetrap might therefore just as
well be taken as proof that it possesses life as the nature of the
Venus-flytrap is taken as proof that it possesses consciousness.
We must be profoundly conscious that the power of articu-
late speech is a human possession. And we must also be aware
of our position in the world compared with the other three
kingdoms of nature. When we are conscious of it, we also
know that our I is very much bound up with everything that
constitutes speech, even though today’s way of speaking has
become very abstract for us. But I would like to make you
aware of something that will give you a new respect for lan-
guage. In ancient times—in the Jewish culture, for example
(though it was yet more pronounced even further back)—the
priests, or those who administered and represented the cults,
would stop speaking when they came to certain concepts while
celebrating the rites. They interrupted their speech and com-
municated the names of high beings—not in words but in
silence—through the appropriate eurythmic gestures. Then
they continued the spoken rites. For instance, the name that
sounds so abstract to us, rendered in Hebrew as “I AM the I
AM,” was never spoken aloud. The priest spoke only up to the
point where this name appeared, made the gesture, and
resumed speaking. What was expressed in this gesture was the
pronounceable name of God in humankind.
Why was this done? If this name had been spoken and
repeated straight out, people were so sensitive at that time that
they would have been stunned. There were sounds and combi-
nations of sounds in speech that could stun the people of
ancient cultures, so great was the effect of such words on them.
A state like fainting would have taken them over if such words
had been spoken and heard. That is why they spoke of the
Lecture Four 61
“unutterable name of God,” which was profoundly significant.

Such names could be spoken only by the priests, and even by
them only on special occasions, for were they to be spoken
before unprepared listeners heaven and earth would collapse.
This means that people would fall unconscious. For this reason
such a name was expressed only in a gesture. Such a feeling is
an expression of what speech really is. Today people thought-
lessly blurt out everything. We can no longer vary the feeling
nuances, and it is very rare to find a person who can be moved
enough, without being sentimental, to have tears in their eyes
when they come across certain passages in a novel, for example.
This is today quite atavistic. The lively feeling for what lies in
speech and sensitivity to language have become very dulled.
This is one of the many things that need to be enlivened
again today; when we do enliven it, it will enable us to feel
more clearly what we really have in speech. We have speech to
thank for much that lives in our I-being, in our feeling of being
a personality. Our feelings can rise to a mood almost of prayer:
I hear the language around me being spoken, and through the
speech the power of I flows into me. Once you have this feeling
for the sanctity of summoning the I through speech, you will
be able to awaken it in the children by a variety of means.
Then, too, you will awaken the feeling of I-being in the chil-
dren, not in an egoistic manner but in another way. There are
two ways of awakening the feeling of the I-being in a child.
Done wrongly, it serves to fan the flames of egoism; done
rightly, it stimulates the will and encourages real selflessness
and willingness to live with the outer world.
I said these things to you because as teachers and educators
you must be permeated by them. It will be up to you to use them
in teaching language and speech. We shall speak tomorrow about
how we can permeate them with consciousness to awaken in the
children the sense for a consciousness of personality.
Lecture Five
AUGUST 26, 1919
We have already discussed how the first lesson in school

should begin. Obviously I cannot go on to describe every step,
but I would like to indicate the essential course the lessons
should take in a way that will enable you to put some of what I
say into practice.
We attached the greatest importance first to telling the chil-
dren why they come to school and then to making them aware
that they have hands. When they have grasped these two ideas,
we should start with drawing and even make the transition to
painting, through which a sense for what is beautiful and not
so beautiful can be developed. We saw that this emerging
understanding can also be found in hearing, leading to the first
elements of a musical sense for what is more beautiful and less
beautiful.
Let us now turn to the next step. We shall assume that you
have continued for a while in the exercises with crayons and
paints. If what is learned is to be built on good foundations, it
is essential that learning to write be preceded by concentration
on drawing, so that writing can, to some extent, be derived
from drawing. It is also essential that reading print be derived
from reading handwriting. We will try to find the transition
from drawing to writing, from writing to reading handwriting,
and from reading handwriting to reading print. Let us assume
that you have reached the stage where the children are finding
Lecture Five 63
their feet in drawing and have mastered to some extent how to

make the curved and straight forms that will be needed in writ-
ing. We now seek the transition to what we have described as
the basis for writing and reading lessons. Today I will start with
a few examples of how you might proceed.
We assume that the children have reached the point where
they can master straight and curved lines with their little hands.
You then try to show them that there are such things as letters, a
whole lot of them. We started with the fish and f. The sequence
you follow is quite immaterial, and you need not proceed in
alphabetical order; I will do so now merely so that you will have
some sort of comprehensive record. Let us see what success we
have in evolving writing and reading out of your own free imag-
ination. I would now say to the children, “You know what a
bath is.” Let me here interject another point. It is very impor-
tant in teaching to be cunning in a rational manner, that is,
always to have something up your sleeve that can contribute
unseen to the children’s education. In this sense it is good to use
the word bath for the step I am about to describe, so that while
they are in school the children are reminded of a bath, of wash-
ing themselves, of cleanliness as such. It is good always to have a
hidden purpose in the background, without actually mention-
ing it or masking it in admonishments. It is helpful to choose
examples that compel the children to think of things that might
also contribute to a moral and aesthetic attitude.
Then you continue, “You see, when grown-ups want to write
down what a bath is they do it like this: ‘bath.’ This is the pic-
ture of what you express when you say, ‘bath,’ and mean a
bath.” Now I again let a number of the children copy this
word, just copy it; whenever they are given a concept like this,
it should go straight into their hands so that they take it in not
just by looking but with their whole being. Then I say, “Watch
how you start to say, ‘bath’; let us look at the beginning of the
word bath, b.” The children have to be led from saying the
whole word bath to just breathing the initial sound, as I illus-
trated with the fish. The next thing to make clear to them is
that just as bath is the sign for the whole bath, so b is the sign
for the beginning of the word bath.
Then I explain that a beginning like this can also be found in
other words. I say, “If you say, ‘band,’ you also start like this; if
you say, ‘bow,’ like the bow some people wear in their hair, you
again start in the same way. Have you ever seen a bear in the
zoo? When you begin to say, ‘bear,’ you breathe the same
sound. All these words start with the same sound.” In this way
I try to lead the children from the whole word to the beginning
of the word by finding the transition to the single sound or let-
ter, always taking the initial letter from the whole word.
It is important that you yourself try to develop the initial let-
ter in a meaningful way out of the drawing element. You will
achieve this very well if you simply use your imagination. Just
think that the people who first saw such animals as beavers and
bears drew the animal’s back, with its hind paws on the ground
and its forepaws lifted up. They drew an animal in the act of
rising on its hind legs, and their drawing turned into a capital
B. You will always find that the initial letter of a word is a draw-
ing, an animal or plant form or some external object. You can
give your imagination free reign; there is no need to delve into
cultural histories, which are incomplete in any case.
Lecture Five 65
The fact is that if you go back in history to the most ancient

forms of Egyptian writing, which was still a type of sign writ-
ing, you find many copies of objects and animals in the letters.
Not until the transition from the Egyptian to the Phoenician
culture did the change take place that brought about the devel-
opment of the picture into a sign representing a sound. It is this
transition that the children must experience anew. Let us there-
fore gain a clear idea of the theory of it ourselves.
When writing first began to develop in ancient Egypt, every
detail that was written down was written in picture writing; it
was drawn, although the drawing had to be as simplified as
possible. If someone employed in copying this picture writing
made a mistake, if, for instance, a holy word was misrepre-
sented, the scribe was condemned to death. We thus see how
very, very seriously anything connected with writing was taken
in ancient Egypt. All writing at that time consisted of pictures
of this kind. Then cultural life was taken up by the Phoeni-
cians, who lived more firmly in the external world. They
retained the initial picture of a word and transferred it to repre-
sent the sound.
Since we are not here to study Egyptian languages, let me
give you an example that is valid for Egyptian and also easily
adapted to our own language. The Egyptians knew that the
form of the upper lip could depict the sound for M. They
therefore took the sign for the letter M from the picture of the
upper lip.
From this sign the letter that we use for the beginning of the
word mouth emerged, and the letter is also valid for any other
word beginning with the same sound. In this way the picture
sign for the beginning of a word became the sign for a sound.
Because this principle was adhered to in the history and
development of writing, it is also excellent for teaching, and we
shall use it here. We shall endeavor to arrive at letters by starting
with drawings. Just as we move from the fish with its two fins to
the f and from the bear dancing on its hind legs to the capital
letter B, so we move from the upper lip to the mouth and from
the mouth to the capital letter M.
With our imagination we seek to pave the way for the child
from drawing to writing. I told you that it is unnecessary to
make extensive studies of the history of writing in order to find
what you need. What you might discover through such studies
will serve you far less in your teaching than what you find
through your own soul activity and your own imagination. The
kind of activity necessary for studying the history of writing
would make you so dead that you would have a far less living
influence on your students than you will have if you yourself
arrive at the idea of deriving the B from the bear. Working
things out for yourself will refresh you so much that what you
tell your students will have a far more living effect than lesson
material you find through historical research. Looking at life
and your teaching with these two aspects in mind, you must
ask yourselves which is more important. Is it to take in a histor-
ical fact with great effort and then strenuously seek to weave it
into your lessons or to have such agility of soul that you can
invent your own examples to offer your students with your
own enthusiasm? It will always give you joy, albeit a quiet joy,
to transfer to a letter the shape you have made yourself out of
some animal or plant. And your joy will live in what you make
out of your student.
Lecture Five 67
Next we point out to the children that what they have found
at the beginning of a word can also appear in the middle. You
say, for instance: “You have all seen a little baby; when grown-
ups want to write the word baby, they do it like this: ‘BABY.’
Here you can see that what you had at the beginning in bear is
now at the beginning and in the middle in baby.”1 You always
use uppercase letters in the beginning so that the children can
see the similarity to the picture. In this way you teach them
that what they have learned about the beginning of a word can
also be found in the middle of a word. This is another step in
the process of dividing the whole into parts for them.
You see that the important point for us in our endeavor to
achieve a living rather than a dead teaching is always to start
from the whole. Just as in arithmetic we start not from the
addenda but from the sum, which we divide into parts, so here,
too, we proceed from the whole to the parts. The great advan-
tage of this method of teaching is that we are thus able to place
the children in the world in a living way; the world is a totality,
and the children maintain permanent links with the living
whole if we progress as I have indicated. Having them learn the
individual letters from pictures gives them a link with living
reality. But you must never neglect to write the letter forms in
such a way that they are seen to arise from the pictures, and
you must always take into account that the consonants can be
explained as pictures of external objects, but never the vowels.
Your point of departure for the vowels is that they always ren-
der the inner being of human beings and their relationship to
the external world.
For example, when you are teaching children the letter A
[“ah”] you will say, “Think of the sun you see in the morning.
1. Rudolf Steiner used the German word Rebe (vine) as his example here, so
I have freely adapted his meaning to an English word.—TRANS.
Can any of you remember what you did when the sun rose
this morning?” Perhaps some of the children will remember
what they did. If none of them remember, they will have to
be helped to recall how they must have stood there and, if the
sunrise was very beautiful, they must have said, “Ah!” A note
of feeling must be struck, calling forth the resonance that
sounds in the vowel. Then you must try to tell them that
when they stood like that and said, “Ah!” it was just as if a
beam of sunlight from their inner being spread out from their
mouths.
That which lives in you when you see the sunrise streams
forth out of your inner being when you say, “Ah” (drawing on
left). But you do not let all of it stream out; you keep some of it
back, and it becomes this sign (drawing on right). You should
try to clothe in the form of a drawing what lies in the breath
when a vowel is spoken. You will find drawings that can show
in a picture how the signs for the vowels have come about.
Primitive cultures do not have many vowels, not even the prim-
itive cultures of today. The languages of primitive cultures are
very rich in consonants; these people can express many more
things in consonants than we know how to express. They even
click their tongues and are skilled in articulating all sorts of
complicated consonants, with only a hint of vowel sounds
between. You will find African tribal people who make sounds
resembling the crack of a whip and so on, while the vowels are
only faintly heard. European travelers who meet these tribes
usually sound their vowels much more strongly than the tribal
peoples do.
Lecture Five 69
We can always evolve the vowels out of drawing. For instance,

by appealing to the children’s feelings, you can try to make them
imagine themselves in the following situation: “Think what
would happen if your brother or sister came to you and said
something you did not understand at first. After a while you
begin to understand what is meant. Then what do you say?”
One of the children may answer, or you may have to point out
that they would say, “ee” [i in German]. When we draw the
shape of the sound ee, it seems to point toward what has been
understood, though it is a somewhat rough expression. In
eurythmy you find it expressed very clearly. A simple line
becomes “i”; the line should be fatter at the bottom and thinner
at the top, but instead, we draw a line and express the thinner
part with a smaller sign above it. In this way every vowel can be
derived from the shape of the aspiration, out of the breath.
Using this method, you will at first be teaching the children a

kind of sign writing. You need not feel constrained about
employing ideas that arouse feelings that really did live in the
process of cultural development. You could say, “Have you ever
seen a tall building with a dome on top?2 A dome, D. You would
have to make the D like this: ∩. This writing seemed awkward,
however, so people upended it and made D. Such ideas really are
inherent in writing, and you can make use of them.
2. Rudolf Steiner’s example here is Dach (roof). Dome fits the letter D so
well that I have used it here and very slightly altered the text accord-
ingly.—TRANS.
Now you proceed to the lowercase letters. You say, “After a

while people did not want their writing to be so complicated,
they wanted it to be simpler. So out of this sign D, which really
ought to be ∩, they made this sign, the lowercase d.” You can
most certainly evolve the existing letter shapes in this way out of
figures you have taught the children in drawing. By always
pointing out the transition from form to form and never teach-
ing in an abstract way, you help the children progress so that
they can find the genuine transition from the form derived from
the drawing to the shape of the actual letter in handwriting.
There are some individuals today who have recognized such
things, though they are rare. There are educators who have
pointed out that writing ought to be derived from drawing, but
they proceed in a different manner from the one recommended
here. Their starting point is the shape of the letters as they are
today; instead of proceeding from the sign for the dancing bear
to the B, they try to lead the children from drawing to writing
by cutting the B into separate lines and curves: I ⊃. They
advocate an abstract version of what we are trying to do con-
cretely. These educators are quite right in seeing that it would
be practical to proceed from drawing to writing, but people
today are too entangled in the deadwood of our culture to hit
upon a clearly living way of going about things.
Let me warn you at this point not to be taken in by all sorts
of modern endeavors that might tempt you to say that efforts
are being made here and there to do this and that. For you will
always discover that the intentions do not have very deep foun-
dations. Somehow people are constantly impelled to attempt
such things, but they will not succeed until humankind has
Lecture Five 71
accepted spiritual science as a part of culture. We can always

make a connection between the human being and the sur-
rounding world by teaching writing in an organic way and
teaching reading by starting with reading handwriting.
It is natural to teaching that there is a certain yearning for
complete freedom, and we should not dismiss this element.
Notice how freedom flows into this discussion of how we
might prepare ourselves to be teachers; our discussion intrinsi-
cally has something to do with freedom. I have pointed out
that you should not fetter yourselves by toiling away at study-
ing how writing came into being during the transition from
Egyptian to Phoenician culture, that you must develop your
own soul capacities. What can be done by this method of
teaching will differ from teacher to teacher. Not everyone can
use a dancing bear; someone might use a better example for the
same purpose. One teacher, however, can achieve the final
result just as well as another. All teachers give of themselves
when they teach. In this, their freedom remains inviolate. The
more teachers desire to preserve their freedom, the more they
will be able to enter into their teaching by giving themselves.
This capacity has been almost entirely lost in recent times, as
you can see from a certain example.
Some of you who are younger may not remember a certain
incident, but it very much annoyed some older people who
understood its implications. Some time ago preparations were
made to create something culturally, very much like introduc-
ing the infamous “official German gravy” in the material realm.
You know that it has often been stressed that there should be a
standardized sauce or gravy for all inns that serve only Germans
and do not have to deal with a select foreign clientele. Well,
spelling was supposed to be standardized just as they would this
“official German gravy.” People have the strangest attitude
toward the matter of standardization, as real examples show.
There is in German literature an instance of a most beauti-

ful, tender relationship between Novalis and a certain lady.3
This relationship is so beautiful because when the lady in ques-
tion passed away, Novalis continued to live with her quite con-
sciously in the spiritual world, following her through death in
an inner meditative activity of soul. He bore witness to this.
The relationship between Novalis and his beloved is one of the
most entrancing and intimate episodes in the history of Ger-
man literature. A certain German scholar wrote a highly intelli-
gent (and, seen from its own point of view, also interesting),
strictly philological treatise on the relationship between Novalis
and the lady. This delicate, tender relationship is “put in its
proper light” through the proof that the lady died before she
had learned to spell properly. She made spelling mistakes in her
letters. In short, we are given, with the strictest scientific accu-
racy, of course, a thoroughly banal picture of this person who
had such a special relationship with Novalis. The scientific
method is so good that any dissertation made in accordance
with it would earn the highest marks. I only want to remind
you that people seem to have forgotten that Goethe was never
able to spell properly, that all through his life he made spelling
mistakes, particularly when he was young. Despite this, he rose
to Goethean greatness. And this is not to mention the people
he knew and thought highly of—their letters, nowadays some-
times published in facsimile, would earn nothing but red cor-
rections from the hand of a schoolmaster. They would get very
poor marks.
All this is linked to a rather unfree aspect of our lives, an aspect
that ought to play no part in education. Only a few decades ago
3. Novalis (1772–1801), born Friedrich von Hardenberg, was a German

poet who, after losing his 14-year-old fiancée, wrote six prose poems inter-
spersed with verse, Hymns to the Night.
Lecture Five 73
it was so pronounced that the more enlightened teachers were

infuriated. Standard German spelling—the well-known Puttka-
mmer orthography—was to be introduced. This meant that the
state not only exercised the right to supervise and administer the
schools but actually laid down the law on spelling. The result is
just what you might expect. This Puttkammer spelling system
has robbed us of much that might still have revealed a feeling for
the more intimate aspects of the German language. Seeing only
today’s abstract spelling, people have lost much in written Ger-
man of what used to live in the German language.
The proper attitude of mind matters most in such circum-
stances. Obviously we cannot let spelling run riot, but we can
at least recognize the opposite points of view. If people, once
they had learned to write, were allowed to put down what they
heard from others just as they heard it (or what came from
within them), their spelling would be extremely varied, exceed-
ingly individualized. This would make communication more
difficult, but it would be extraordinarily interesting. On the
other hand, our task is to develop not only our own individual-
ity in community with others but also our social impulses and
feelings. A great deal of what could be revealed as our own
individuality is expunged in what we have to develop for the
sake of living together with others. We should feel that this is
so; we should be taught to feel that we do such a thing purely
for social reasons. Therefore when you begin to orient your
writing lessons toward spelling, your starting point must be a
quite specific set of feelings. You will again and again have to
point out to the children, as I have already said earlier, that
they should respect and esteem grown-ups, that they are them-
selves growing up into a world already formed and waiting to
receive them, and that therefore they must take notice of what
is already there. This is the point of view from which children
must be introduced to subjects like correct spelling. Spelling
lessons must run parallel with developing feelings of respect

and esteem for what their predecessors have established. Spell-
ing must not be taught as an abstraction, as though it existed as
an absolute on the basis of some divine—or, if you will, Puttkam-
mer—law. You must develop in the children the feeling that
the grown-ups whom we are to respect spell like this, and we
ought to follow their example. Variability in spelling will result,
but it will not be excessive; the growing child will make a cer-
tain adaptation to the world of the grown-ups. And we must
count on this adaptation. It is not our task to create in children
the belief that this is right and that is wrong. The only belief we
should arouse, thus building on living authority, is that this is
the way grown-ups do it.
This is what I meant when I said we must find the transition
from the child’s first stage of life, up to the change of teeth, to
the second stage, up to puberty, by making the transition from
the principle of imitation to that of authority. These ideas must
be introduced everywhere in practice, not by drilling the chil-
dren to respect authority but by acting in a way that will help
foster their feeling for authority—for instance, by teaching
spelling in the way I have just described.
Lecture Six
AUGUST 27, 1919
You will have to be not only teachers at the Waldorf school

but also, if things turn out as they should, advocates of the
whole Waldorf school system. For you will know the real pur-
pose of the Waldorf school far more clearly than anyone who
might try to explain it to either the more immediate or the
wider public. So that you can be advocates in the right sense of
what is striven for within the Waldorf school, and through it
for cultural life in general, you will have to be in a position to
defend it even against public opinions that are antagonistic or
merely disapproving. Consequently, I must include in our dis-
cussions of teaching methods a chapter that follows quite natu-
rally from what we have been discussing so far in these sessions.
You know that in the field of education, as well as elsewhere,
great results are expected nowadays of so-called experimental
psychology. Experiments are carried out on people to deter-
mine what constitutes an individual’s ability to form concepts
or to memorize, or even how their will functions. Naturally,
elucidating the latter can be done only in a roundabout way,
since willing is a process that takes place in a state of sleep. In
the same way, the experiences of people during sleep can be
determined only indirectly, by means of electrical equipment
in the laboratory and not by direct observation. Such experi-
ments are actually conducted. Please do not think that I am
wholly against such experiments. They can be meaningful as the
feelers of science probing new fields like tendrils. Many interest-

ing discoveries can be made by means of experimentation, and I
certainly do not want to condemn it wholesale. I would be only
too pleased if everyone who wanted to could have access to a
psychological laboratory in which to conduct experiments. We
must consider for a moment the rise of this experimental psy-
chology, particularly in the form recommended by the educator
Meumann, who essentially belongs to the Herbartian school.1
Why is experimental psychology practiced today? It is prac-
ticed because people have lost the gift of observing the human
being directly. They can no longer rely on the forces that link,
that inwardly connect one human being to another and also,
in the same way, an adult to a child. Therefore they seek to
find out by external means how to treat the growing child. You
see how much more inward is the path we want to follow in
our education and our teaching methods. This path is
urgently needed for the present and also for the near future of
humankind. On the one hand we see the growth of this urge
toward experimental psychology, and on the other hand, we
also see how these very methods lead to a misconception of cer-
tain simple facts of life. Let me illustrate this by an example.
Experimental psychologists have recently been particularly
interested in what they call the process of comprehension, for
instance, the process of comprehension in reading, in the read-
ing of a given passage. In order to determine the nature of the
process of comprehension, they have tried to work with people
whom they designate “experimental subjects.” Put briefly, the
1. Ernst Meumann (1862–1915) was a student of Wundt, a pioneer in

experimental education. Herbartians were those who followed the philoso-
phy of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), a German educator and phi-
losopher who developed a metaphysical ideology of pluralistic realism
(especially important for psychology) that rejected notions of faculties and
innate ideas and constructed a full theory for a new kind of pedagogy.
Lecture Six 77
very lengthy experiments take the following course. An experi-

mental subject, a child or an older person, is presented with a
written passage to read, and investigations are then made into
what the child, for instance, should most profitably do first in
order to achieve the most rapid comprehension. It is noted that
the most expedient method is first to introduce the person to
the subject matter of the passage.
A further series of experiments shows that the experimental
subject then carries out a process of “passive assimilation.”
After the content has been introduced, it is then passively
assimilated. Out of this passive assimilation of a written passage
is supposed to arise the faculty of “anticipatory learning,” the
ability to reproduce what was first introduced and then pas-
sively assimilated in a free spiritual activity. And the fourth act
of this drama is then the recapitulation of all the points that are
still uncertain, in other words, that have not entered fully into
the person’s life of soul and spirit. If you let the experimental
subject carry out in proper sequence first the process of becom-
ing acquainted with the content of the passage, then passive
assimilation, then anticipatory learning, and finally, recapitula-
tion of whatever is not fully understood, you will come to the
conclusion that this is the most expedient method of assimilat-
ing, reading, and retaining. Do not misunderstand me—I am
putting this idea forward because I must, in view of the fact
that people talk at cross-purposes so much these days; it is pos-
sible to want to express an identical point with diametrically
opposed words.
Accordingly, the experimental psychologists will maintain
that by such painstaking methods we can learn what we ought
to be doing in education. But those who recognize more
deeply the life of the human being as a whole know that you
cannot arrive at a real educational activity by these means any
more than you can put together a live beetle after you have
dissected it. This is just not possible. It is equally impossible

when you anatomize the human being’s soul activity. Of
course, it is interesting, and in other connections, can also be
most fruitful to study the anatomy of human soul activity. But
it does not make teachers. This experimental psychology will
not, in fact, lead to a renewal of education, which can arise
only out of an inner understanding of the human being.
I had to say this lest you should misunderstand a statement I
now want to make, a statement that will very much irritate
those who are attached to the present-day climate of opinion.
The statement is naturally one-sided in the way I shall put it,
and its one-sidedness must, of course, be counterbalanced.
What do the experimental psychologists discover when they
have anatomized, or should we say tortured (for the procedure
is not pleasant), the soul of their experimental subject? They
have discovered what is, in their opinion, an extraordinarily
significant result that is written boldly again and again in edu-
cational handbooks as a final conclusion. Put in clear language,
the result, roughly, is that a passage to be read and learned is
more easily retained if the content is understood than if it is
not understood. To use the scientific idiom, it has been deter-
mined by research that it is expedient first to discover the
meaning of a passage, for then the passage is easier to learn.
Now I must make my heretical statement. If the conclusion
of these experiments is correct, then I could have known it
anyway. I should like to know what person equipped with
ordinary common sense would not already realize that a pas-
sage is easier to remember if you have understood the sense of
it than if you have not. There is no doubt that results of exper-
imental psychology bring to light the most obvious truths. The
truisms you find in the textbooks of experimental psychology
are on occasion such that no one who has not been trained in
the pursuit of science to accept the fascinating along with the
Lecture Six 79
absolutely tedious could possibly be persuaded to bother with

them. People do, in fact, become inured to this kind of think-
ing even by the way they are drilled in their early school days,
for the phenomenon is present even then, though it is less pro-
nounced by far than in the universities.
This heretical statement, namely, that you have to know the
meaning of something that you are supposed to remember, is
aimed particularly at teachers. But there is another point to con-
sider: What is assimilated as meaning works only on the faculty
of observation, the faculty of cognizing through thought; by lay-
ing emphasis on the meaning, we educate a person one-sidedly
merely to observe the world, to know it through thought. If we
were to teach only in accordance with that statement, the result
would be nothing but weak-willed individuals. Therefore the
statement is correct in a way and yet not entirely correct. To be
absolutely correct, we would have to say that if you want to do
the best you can for an individual’s faculty of cognizing through
thought, you would have to analyze the meaning of everything
that the person is to take in and retain.
It is indeed a fact that by first one-sidedly analyzing the
meaning of everything we can go a long way in the education
of the human being’s observation of the world. But we would
get nowhere in educating the will, for we cannot force the will
to emerge by throwing a strong light on the meaning of any-
thing. The will wants to sleep; it does not want to be awakened
fully by what I might call the perpetual unrestrained laying
bare of meaning. It is simply a necessity of life that penetrates
beyond the simple truth about the revelation of meaning and
gives rise to the fact that we must also do things with the chil-
dren that do not call for the elucidation of meaning. Then we
shall educate their will.
The unseemly practice of one-sidedly using the revelation of
meaning has run riot; this can be seen particularly in movements
like the theosophical movement. You know how much I have

protested over the years against a certain bad habit in theosoph-
ical circles. I have even had to see Hamlet, a pure work of art,
explained in theosophical jargon. It is said that this represents
manas, something else the I, and another the astral body.2 One
character is one thing, another something else. Explanations of
this kind have been particularly favored. I have fulminated
against this sort of practice because it is a sin against human life
to interpret symbolically a work that is meant to be taken in
directly as pure art. A meaning is thus read into things in an
unseemly fashion that raises them up as objects of mere obser-
vation to a position they should not occupy.
All this stems from the fact that the theosophical movement
is a decadent movement. It is the ultimate remnant of a declin-
ing culture, not something that has, in its whole attitude, any-
thing to do with anthroposophy. Anthroposophy aims at the
opposite—an ascending movement, the beginning of an
ascent. This is radically different. That is why in the theosoph-
ical realm so much comes to the fore that is fundamentally a
manifestation of extreme decadence. That there are people who
can actually perpetrate the symbolical interpretation of the dif-
ferent characters in Hamlet is the consequence of the atrocious
education we have had and of the way we have striven to be
educated only in the realm of meaning.
Human life calls for more than education in the realm of
meaning; it calls for education in what the will experiences in
its sleeping condition—rhythm, beat, melody, harmony of col-
ors, repetition, any kind of activity that does not call for a grasp
of meaning. If you let the children repeat sentences that they
2. Theosophists use manas to designate the “mind principle,” which

becomes dual when manifesting in the human constitution, thus dividing
into a higher and a lower manas.
Lecture Six 81
are nowhere near ready to understand because they are too

young, if you make them learn these sentences by heart, you
are not working on the faculty of understanding, since you
cannot explain the meaning that will emerge only later on. In
this way, you are working on the children’s will, and that is
what you should do, indeed, you must do. On the one hand,
you must try to bring to the children whatever is preeminently
artistic—music, drawing, modeling, and so on. But, on the
other hand, you must introduce the children to things that
have an abstract meaning. You must introduce them in such a
way that even though the children cannot understand the
meaning as yet, they will be able to do so later on, when they
are more mature, because they have taken them in through rep-
etition and can remember them. If you have worked in this
way, you have worked on the children’s will.
You have also worked on the children’s feeling life, and that is
something you should not forget. Just as feeling lies between
willing and thinking—and this is revealed from the point of
view of both the soul and the spirit—so do the educational mea-
sures for the feeling life lie between those for the faculty of cog-
nizing through thought and those for the will and its
development. For thinking and knowing we must certainly
undertake measures that involve the revelation of meaning:
reading, writing, and so on. For willed activity we must cultivate
everything that does not involve just the interpretation of mean-
ing but needs to be directly grasped by the whole human
being—everything artistic. What lies between these two will
work mainly on the development of the feeling life, of the heart
forces. These heart forces are quite strongly affected if the chil-
dren are given the opportunity of first learning something by
rote without understanding it and without any explanations of
the meaning though, of course, there is a meaning. When they
have matured through other processes, they will remember what
they have learned and will then understand what they took in
earlier. This subtle process must be very much taken into
account in teaching if we want to bring up human beings who
have an inward life of feeling. For feeling establishes itself in life
in a peculiar manner. People ought to observe what goes on in
this realm, but they do not do so effectively. Let me suggest to
you an observation that you can easily make with a little effort.
Suppose you wanted to obtain a clear picture of the state of
Goethe’s soul in 1790. You can do so by studying just a selection
of the works he produced during that year. There is a chronolog-
ical list of all his poems at the end of every edition of his works.
So you ponder the poems he wrote in 1790 and whatever plays
he created. You call to mind that he finished his beautiful treatise
The Metamorphosis of Plants that year, and you remember that he
formulated the first ideas about his Theory of Colors. Out of all
this you form a picture of his mood of soul in 1790, and you
ask: What played into the soul life of Goethe in 1790? You will
find the answer to this question only if you cast a searching look
over everything that happened to Goethe from 1749 to 1790
and over all the events that followed from that year until his
death in 1832. These are things that Goethe did not know then
but you know now. The remarkable realization emerges that
Goethe’s state of soul in 1790 was a combination of what was to
come later, that is, what still had to be achieved, and what had
gone before, that is, what had already been experienced. This is
an extraordinarily significant observation, but people shy away
from it because it leads to realms that they understandably do
not like to impinge on to make such observations.
Try yourselves to observe in this way the soul life of a per-
son whom you knew for some time and who has recently
died. If you train yourselves to a more subtle observation of
the soul, you will discover the following fact. Let us say that
somebody who was your friend died in 1918. You knew the
Lecture Six 83
person for some time, and you can ask, What was his state of
soul in 1912? Taking everything into account that you know
of him, you will find that in his soul mood in 1912 the prep-
aration for the death he was soon to meet was present; it
played unconsciously into his feeling life at that time. The
feeling life in its totality is what I call the “mood of soul.” A
person who is soon to die has quite a different mood of soul
from one who still has long to live.
Now you will understand why people are not eager to make
such observations, because, to put it mildly, it would be rather
uncomfortable to observe a person’s imminent death expressed
in his soul mood. And it is indeed expressed there. But for ordi-
nary life it is not good for people to notice such things. That is
why, on the whole, this kind of observation is removed from
ordinary life in the same way that the will as a sleeping force is
disassociated from waking consiousness even when we are
awake. But the teacher must, after all, take up a position out-
side ordinary life to some extent. Teachers must not shrink
from standing outside ordinary life and accepting, for the sake
of their work, truths that may bring a shocking or tragic ele-
ment to ordinary life. There is some lost ground to be recov-
ered in this respect, especially in the educational system of
Central Europe.
You know how during the earlier decades of our educational
life in Central Europe, teachers, especially in the grammar and
middle schools, were still people who were rather looked down
upon by the ordinary person. They were considered unworldly,
pedantic people who did not know how to behave properly in
society, always wore long frock coats instead of dinner jackets,
and so on; these were at one time the teachers of young people,
especially the more mature youngsters. Recently things have
changed. University professors have begun to wear proper din-
ner jackets and even manage to get along quite well in the
world, and the fact that the former state of affairs has been
overcome is regarded as a great step forward. This is a good
thing. But this state of affairs also needs to be transcended in
another way. In future, this state of affairs must also be mas-
tered in the sense that the way teachers stand outside life must
not consist merely in always appearing in long frock coats
when other people are wearing dinner jackets. They may in a
way retain their position of being somewhat outside life, but
this position should be linked with a deeper view of life than
can be achieved by those who wear dinner jackets for certain
occasions. I am speaking only figuratively, of course, for I have
nothing against dinner jackets.
Teachers must be able to regard life more profoundly; other-
wise they will never succeed in handling the growing human
being in an appropriate and fruitful way. They will have to
accept certain truths like the one just mentioned. Life itself
requires, in a sense, that it contain secrets. It is not discreet
secrets that we need for the immediate future; in education we
need knowledge of certain mysteries of life. The ancient teach-
ers of the mysteries used to preserve such secrets as esoteric
knowledge because they could not be imparted directly. In a
certain sense, all teachers must be in possession of truths that
they cannot directly pass on to the world. The world that lives
outside and does not have the task of educating the young
would be confused in its healthy progress if it had daily access
to such truths. You do not understand fully how to treat grow-
ing children if you are unable to discern the path that teach-
ings take within them when you make them known in a way
that the children cannot fully understand at their present stage
of development. They will understand these teachings later,
when you come back to them again and are then able to
explain not only what you now tell them but also what they
took in earlier.
Lecture Six 85
This works very strongly on the heart forces. That is why it is

essential in any good school that the teacher remain with a sin-
gle group of students for as long as possible. The teacher takes
them the first year, continues with them the following year,
moves on again with them to the third year, and so on—as far
as external circumstances will allow. And the teacher who has
had the eighth grade one year should start again with the first
grade the following year. It is sometimes appropriate to return
only years later to something you have instilled into the chil-
dren’s souls. Whatever the circumstances, the education of the
heart forces suffers if the children have a new teacher each year
who cannot follow up what has been instilled into their souls
in previous years. It is a feature of this teaching method that the
teacher moves up through the grades with the same students.
Only in this way can one work with the rhythms of life. And
life has a rhythm in the most comprehensive sense.
This is apparent in day-to-day life in the tasks we take up. If,
for instance, you have become accustomed over the period of
just one week to eating a roll and butter at half past ten every
morning, you will probably find that you are quite hungry for
your buttered roll at the same time the second week. This is how
easily the human organism adapts to rhythm. And not only the
external organism but the human being as a whole has a ten-
dency to rhythm. For this reason, it is beneficial throughout life
(and that is what we are concerned with when we educate and
teach children) to attend to rhythmical repetition. That is why it
is useful to consider how quite specific educational motifs can
be repeated year by year. Select lessons you want to take up with
the children, make a note of them, and return to something
similar every year. You can adhere to this pattern even in the
more abstract subjects. In a manner suited to the children’s
nature, you teach addition in the first grade. In the second grade
you come back to addition and teach more as well. And in the
third grade you return to it yet again. The same action is carried
out repeatedly, but in progressive repetitions.
To enter the rhythm of life in this way is of the greatest
importance for all education—far more important than perpet-
ually emphasizing meaningful structure in your lessons so that
you can quickly reveal everything significant in all that you
have to offer. We can guess what this demand really means only
when we have gradually developed a feeling for life. And then,
by the very reason of being teachers, we shall avoid the external
experimental approach that is so prevalent today, even in edu-
cation. Once again I am pointing to these matters not in order
to condemn them but to improve certain aspects that have
turned out to be detrimental to our spiritual culture.
There are also educational textbooks on the results of memory
experiments with “experimental subjects.” These people are
treated in a peculiar manner. Experiments are carried out with
them to determine the manner in which they retain something
of which they know the meaning. Then they are given a series of
words that have no meaningful connection and so on. Such
experiments seeking to determine the laws of memory are prac-
ticed very extensively today. Discoveries are made that are formu-
lated as scientific theses. Just as in physics, for instance, we have
Gay-Lussac’s law and so on, attempts are now made to register
similar laws in experimental psychology and education. In accor-
dance with a certain quite justifiable scientific yearning, learned
dissertations are expounded on the different forms of memory.
First we have the memory type that assimilates with ease or
with difficulty; second, there is the type that finds it easy or dif-
ficult to reproduce what has been assimilated. You see that first,
“experimental subjects” are tormented for the purpose of dis-
covering that there are people who find it easy to memorize and
others who find it difficult. And then others are tormented in
order to find out that there are those who find it either easy or
Lecture Six 87
difficult to recall what they have stored in their memories. In

this way, through research, we now know that there are types of
people who assimilate with ease or with difficulty and that
there are types who recall with ease or with difficulty what has
been memorized. Third, there is the type of person who could
be described as true and exact in their memory; fourth, there is
the person with comprehensive memory; and, fifth, there is the
type whose memory is retentive and reliable, as opposed to the
one who easily forgets. All this very much accords with the
yearning of modern science to classify. We are now armed with
scientific results, and we can state what has been found out sci-
entifically in the exact psychology of memory types. First, there
is the type of person who assimilates with ease or with diffi-
culty; second, the one who recalls with ease or with difficulty;
third, the type who is true and exact; fourth, the comprehen-
sive type; and, fifth, the retentive person, who may remember
things for years, as opposed to one who forgets easily.
I give all due respect to this scientific method of investigation
that devotedly and very conscientiously maltreats countless
experimental subjects and most ingeniously sets to work to
obtain results so that we may know the types of memory that
may be distinguished (now also in the field of education, since
psychological experiments with children have shown that it
applies to them, too). Despite all due respect for this scientific
method, I would nevertheless like to raise the following objec-
tion. Surely anyone endowed with sound common sense must
know that certain people find it easy or difficult to memorize
something or easy or difficult to recall something. We also know
that others can repeat things truly and exactly, in contrast to
those who muddle everything up. Still others have a comprehen-
sive memory capable of retaining a long tale, as opposed to those
who can memorize only something short. And, finally, some
people remember things for a long time, perhaps years, while
others forget everything within a week. This is old, established

knowledge as far as common sense is concerned. Yet it must be
researched by scientific methods that inspire us all with respect,
for it cannot be denied that they are very ingenious indeed.
Two comments are applicable here. First, it is better to culti-
vate sound common sense in education than to enter into
experimentation of this kind, which may very well develop
ingenuity but does not bring us any nearer to the individual
characteristics of the children. Second, we may also say that our
era is in a sorry plight indeed if we have to assume that those
who are to be teachers have so little common sense that they
have to learn by such roundabout means of the existence of the
different types of memory. These certainly have to be regarded
as symptoms of the state of our spiritual culture.
I needed to draw your attention to these topics, for you will
find people saying to you: “So you have found a position at the
Waldorf school. It is the most amateurish institution; they do
not even want to hear about the greatest achievement of our
time, namely, experimental psychology. The professional thing
to do is to take up these methods, whereas the way they teach at
the Waldorf school is pure quackery.” You will have to realize
that it will sometimes be necessary to recognize the relationship
between science (which should not be any the less respected) and
what must be built up on the basis of an inwardly oriented teach-
ing and educational practice. This creates an inner, loving atten-
tiveness toward the child, as compared with the external
relationships we learn about through experimentation. Certainly,
the inward quality has not entirely disappeared; indeed, it is
more prevalent than we might think. But it is in definite opposi-
tion to the scientific teaching that is increasingly being pursued.
To a certain extent, it is true that the pursuit of scientific meth-
ods at the present time can destroy a great deal, but it has no
power to drive out every remnant of sound common sense.
Lecture Six 89
Let this be our starting point, for if we cultivate it well, it

will lead us to an inner relationship with what ought to happen
in the lessons we teach. We must realize that we are living at the
beginning of a new age and that it is essential for us to be thor-
oughly aware of this fact. Up to the middle of the fifteenth cen-
tury, surviving elements of Graeco-Roman culture could still
be felt. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, these ele-
ments have been no more than echoes. But those who even
today live in these echoes still have the tendency in certain
lower layers of their consciousness to hark back again and again
to that Graeco-Latin age that in its place was wholly admirable
but whose continuation today no longer has life.
Think how self-satisfied people who have learned something
are if they can explain to you. If you want to educate properly,
they say, you must not only look at the rhythm and the rhyme of
a poem, you must also give a suitable commentary as to the
meaning. When you have properly introduced your students to
the meaning, you will have reached the point at which they
should actively take it into themselves. Even the ancient Romans
(they will add after a long dissertation on the necessity of starting
with an explanation of the poem) used to say, “Rem tene, verba
sequantur” (Once you have understood a thing, the words follow
naturally). This is a tactic you will frequently encounter in peo-
ple who consider themselves very learned and far above any dilet-
tantism. First they expound on a subject as being the pinnacle of
modern knowledge, and then they bolster their argument with
the words of the ancient Romans. Of course, to be able to quote
in Greek is a sign of supreme scholarship. For the fourth
post-Atlantean period this attitude was the right one, but it is not
in keeping with our own time. The ancient Greeks did not send
their children to school to learn ancient Egyptian; they made
them learn Greek. But we today first introduce our children to
ancient languages. This is a fact that must be understood.
Lecture Seven
AUGUST 28, 1919
In the beginning you will face certain difficulties in teaching

that your school, by its very nature, will share with rural
schools. Urban schools today do not have especially good
methods, and whatever might have been valuable in them is
often spoiled by far-fetched ideas. But they do have the advan-
tage of being well equipped with teaching aids, particularly for
physics, chemistry, and natural history. It is the same in pri-
mary schools as it is in secondary schools and scientific insti-
tutes. While the town schools have poorer methods and better
equipment, the country schools still (if their teachers have not
been spoiled by training in a town before being posted to the
country) sometimes have the better teaching methods, even
though they are less well equipped with teaching aids. (We
should not, however, ignore the goodwill of new teachers in
urban schools to find good methods.) Those who are seeking
to come to grips with the problems and attitudes of our time
have no laboratories and experimental equipment at their dis-
posal, whereas those who are better equipped at universities
and other institutions apply the least fruitful scientific meth-
ods. This state of affairs has existed for a long time in the scien-
tific world. One cannot help wondering, for instance, what
might not have grown out of Schopenhauer’s philosophy
(which is now no more than a kind of philosophical dilettan-
tism), if Schopenhauer had had all the means at his disposal
Lecture Seven 91
that a professor of a few years’ standing at a university has

today.1 How little of the Schopenhauer spirit is evoked these
days by university professors who otherwise have sufficient
means at their disposal.
You will often have to rely on your powers of invention and
fall back on simple devices in situations for which city schools
have plenty of equipment. This may be just what you need to
make your teaching really lively, but in some instances it will
also detract from your pleasure in your work. You will feel this
to be particularly true when the children have reached the age
of nine, when it is hardly possible to present the right kind of
lessons without proper equipment. You will have to substitute
drawings or simple, primitive paintings in all sorts of circum-
stances where, under ideal circumstances, you would use the
object itself in your lesson.
I have made this preliminary observation because today I
want to speak to you about the transition in teaching method
that must be made particularly carefully when the children
approach their ninth year. We will not understand the curricu-
lum until we have schooled our educational capacities suffi-
ciently to perceive the being of the child between the seventh
and fifteenth years of life. I would like to show you as teachers
what you will have to apply in your lessons at the point when
the children reach the age of nine to ten years. Of course, you
will present it in a more elementary way that they can under-
stand. The point in question is reached by some children
before the age of nine and by others later, but on average what I
want to tell you about today starts with the ninth year.
When this period in the children’s lives draws near, it will be
necessary to introduce the subjects of natural history into the
1. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), a German philosopher who ex-

pounded a doctrine of pessimism and irrational impulses arising from the will.
lessons. Before this time, natural history is presented in a narra-

tive form, as I described yesterday in our seminar when I spoke
about the relationship of the animal and plant worlds to the
human being.2 We use a narrative, descriptive form when we
introduce natural history to the children early on. But we can-
not start giving proper lessons on natural history before they
have reached the age of nine.
It is enormously important to know that the aim in teaching
the children about natural history will be completely subverted
if we do not start these natural history lessons by describing the
human being. You may say quite rightly that there is not much
you can tell nine-year-old children about the natural history of
the human being. But however little it may be, you must
present it to them as a preparation for all your other natural
history lessons. When you give such lessons, you must be clear
that the human being represents a synthesis, a bringing
together of the three kingdoms of nature, that the three king-
doms of nature are united in the human being at a higher level.
You will not have to say this explicitly to the children, but dur-
ing the course of your lessons you must give them a feeling for
how the human being is a synthesis of all the other kingdoms
of nature. You will achieve this aim if, in the way you treat the
subject of the human being, you awaken in the children the
impression of the human being’s importance within the scheme
of universal order.
Perhaps you will start by describing the human being’s
external appearance to the nine-year-olds. You will draw their
attention to the principal division of the human being into
head, trunk, and limbs; in doing so, you will always have to
take account of the external appearance, the external form.
You will do well to make use of drawing, which you have
2. Discussion 6 in Discussions with Teachers.

Lecture Seven 93
already practiced with the children, to conjure up for them an

idea of the main parts of the human form. You will show them
that the head is round like a ball—that it is somewhat flat-
tened on the underside where it rests on the trunk and is thus
a ball perched on the trunk. It is helpful to give the children a
picture like this. It awakens simultaneously the feeling and the
will element, for they begin to see the head artistically from
the point of view of its spherical shape. This is important. You
appeal in this way to the child as a whole and not only to the
intellect.
Then you try to awaken in the children the idea that the
trunk is a “fragment” of the head. You can do this by drawing
and saying that the head is round like a ball. If you take a piece
out of the round ball [the shaded part of the drawing] by cut-
ting it off and keeping what remains, so that you have what
looks like the moon left over from the sun, you have the basic
form of the trunk. It would be a good idea to make a round ball
out of wax or kneaded dough and then cut off the shaded part,
so that you have the shape of the moon as it arises from the
sphere. With this method, you could really call forth in the chil-
dren the picture of the human trunk as a fragment of a sphere.
And for the limbs, you must awaken the idea that they are
appended to the trunk. There will be much the children cannot
understand, and yet you will rouse the strong impression that
the limbs are added on to the human organism. At this stage,

you should not go on to explain that the limbs extend into the
body as a morphological potential, linked there with the sexual
and digestive organs, which simply continue the limbs
inwardly. But you must certainly rouse most strongly in the
children the idea that the limbs are inserted into the organism
from the outside. You will have given the children a first con-
ception of the human form.
Next you should awaken the idea, however elementary and
primitive, that our faculty of looking at the world is bound up
with the sphere of our head. You can say to the children: “Your
eyes, your ears, your nose, and your mouth are all in your head.
You see with your eyes, you hear with your ears, you smell with
your nose, and you taste with your mouth. Most of what you
know about the outside world you know through your head.”
If you expand on this idea, the children will gain a concept of
the special formation and task of the head. Then you instill in
them an idea of the trunk by saying: “What you taste with your
tongue goes down into your trunk as food; what you hear with
your ears goes into your trunk as sound.” It is good to create in
the children the idea of the whole constellation of the organs in
the human being. Indicate to them that in their chest they have
organs for breathing, and in their abdomen they have their
stomach for digesting.
Next you do well to let the children consider how the human
being’s limbs, in the form of feet, serve for walking, and in the
form of hands can move and work freely. It is helpful if the chil-
dren can come to an understanding of the difference between
the way the feet and arms serve human beings. The feet serve by
carrying human beings’ bodies about and enabling them to go
to the different places where they live and work. This activity
stands in contrast to that of the arms and hands, with which
human beings do not have to carry the body, but with which
Lecture Seven 95
they can instead work freely. While the feet are planted on the
ground, the hands can be stretched out into the air so that they
can work. In short, quite early on the children should be made
aware of the essential difference between human legs and feet
and human arms and hands. There is a distinction between the
service rendered by feet and legs when they carry the body and
that rendered by the hands and arms that do not work for the
body but for the world. This difference between the egoistic ser-
vice of the feet and the selfless service of the hands that work for
the human being’s environment should be made clear to the
children at an early stage through their feelings.
By letting the concept arise out of the form, we teach the
children as much as possible about the natural history of the
human being. And only then do we continue with the rest of
natural history, first to the animal kingdom. No doubt you will
have to contrive some sort of substitute, but it would be ideal if
you could bring to the classroom a cuttlefish, a mouse, a lamb
or a horse or some other mammal, and some sort of image of
the human being. Of course, you will have plenty of human
specimens, for all you need do is name one of the children and
present this child to the others when you want the human
being to be the object of their study. You must be quite clear
about how you will proceed. First, you will seek to familiarize
the class with the cuttlefish. You will tell them how it lives in
the sea and show them what it looks like, either by bringing a
live one into the classroom or by making drawings. In short,
you will introduce the cuttlefish to the children. When you
describe it to them, they will feel that you are doing it in a par-
ticular way. They may not notice till much later, perhaps when
you describe the mouse to them, how differently you treat the
subject of the mouse from that of the cuttlefish.
You must try to develop an artistic feeling in the children so
that in the way you set about describing the cuttlefish quite
differently from the manner in which you describe the mouse,

you also give them a certain feeling for the difference between
these two animals. You must hint at the nature of the cuttlefish
by showing how it feels what surrounds it; if it scents danger, it
at once emits its dark juice, enveloping itself in a kind of aura
to divert the attention of the approaching enemy. You can tell
the children all sorts of things to help them understand. You
will show them that whatever the cuttlefish does, perhaps when
protecting itself from its enemies in some way or when it eats,
it does it in the same way that human beings act when they eat
or interact with the world. When human beings eat, they expe-
rience a taste, a feeling that is communicated through the
tongue, the organ of taste. And the human eye feels the con-
stant need to look into the light; by doing this, the eye comes
to grips with light. Because the human being’s organs of taste
want to taste, they take in what serves as food. You should
describe the cuttlefish in a way that gives the children a feeling
for its sensitivity, its delicate perception of the things around it.
You will have to work out an artistic description that will really
help the children grasp the cuttlefish.
Then you describe the mouse, giving a picture of its pointed
snout and how clearly visible are the whiskers on this pointed
snout and the gnawing teeth protruding from the lower and
upper jaws. You describe its disproportionately large ears and
then come to the cylindrical body with its fine, velvety coat of
hair. Next you describe its limbs, the smaller forefeet and the
somewhat larger hind feet that allow the mouse to jump well.
It also has a scaly tail that is less hairy. You show the children
that if the mouse wants to climb or grasp with its forepaws, it
supports itself with this tail. The tail is very useful because it is
more sensitive inwardly owing to its scaly surface, lacking hair.
Once again you describe the mouse to the children by artisti-
cally building up its forms. You will succeed in this artistic
Lecture Seven 97
construction if you awaken in the children the notion that for

all the functions for which the cuttlefish does not need append-
ages attached to its body, the mouse needs such appendages.
The cuttlefish is sensitive in itself, through its body, and it does
not need large ears like the mouse. Its relationship to its envi-
ronment allows it to take in nourishment without the help of a
pointed snout. And it does not need the large limbs of the
mouse because it uses its body to propel itself along in the
water. Sum up in detail what you want to impart to the chil-
dren in this artistic way, namely, that the cuttlefish manifests
itself not through limbs but through the body itself.
I have to describe all this to you so that you can translate it
into teaching, for you must become conscious of what you have
to bring more unconsciously into the lessons you prepare artisti-
cally. You must describe the mouse in a way that gradually awak-
ens in the children the feeling that the mouse is organized in
such a way that the limbs serve the life of the trunk. Make it clear
to the children that the lamb, too, is organized so that the limbs
can serve the trunk, just as the horse, living in the wild, is also.
For instance, you can show the children how the mouse must
have very pointed and sharp teeth; otherwise, it would not be
able to gnaw at objects as it must in order to nourish itself or
even bore holes to live in. With so much gnawing it keeps wear-
ing down its teeth, but, like our nails, its teeth continually grow
from within, so that the mouse constantly replaces its tooth sub-
stance. This is particularly noticeable in the teeth, which are,
after all, also organs that are appended to the rest of the organism
and are formed in a way that enables the mouse’s trunk to live.
In this way you have awakened in the children through their
feelings a clear, though elementary, picture of the cuttlefish and
a clear picture of the structure of the mouse. Now you return to
the form of the human being. You make clear to the children
that if we were to select the part of the human being that is
most like the cuttlefish, we would curiously enough find that

this is the head. The part of the human being most like the cut-
tlefish is the head. It is bias that causes people to imagine that
their heads are the most perfect part of themselves. It is cer-
tainly structured in a most complicated way, but it is really just
a metamorphosed cuttlefish, a metamorphosed lower animal.
The relationship of the human head to its environment is simi-
lar to that of the lower animals to theirs. With the trunk the
human being is most like the higher animals, such as the
mouse, the lamb, and the horse. But whereas the cuttlefish can
entirely maintain its life through its head, the human being
cannot. A human being’s head must be set on top of the trunk
and rest there; it cannot move about freely. The cuttlefish,
however, is fundamentally an entire head and nothing else, and
it moves about freely in water. You will have to make sure that
the children gain a feeling for the fact that the lower animals
are heads moving about unhindered, though they are as yet not
as perfect as human heads. And you must awaken in the chil-
dren the understanding that the higher animals are mainly
trunks and have skillfully formed their organs out of nature so
that these organs can chiefly serve the needs of the trunk. This
is much less true with human beings; they are less perfect in the
trunk than are the higher animals.
Then we must arouse in the children a sense for what is the
most perfect part of the human being’s external form. The
human being is most perfect in the limbs. If you follow the
sequence of the higher animals up to the apes, you will find that
the forelimbs are not so very different from the hind limbs and
that the main function of all four is to carry the trunk, move
about with it, and so on. This marvelous differentiation of the
limbs into feet and hands, legs and arms, happens only in the
human being; it expresses itself in the predisposition to walking
upright and having a vertical posture. No animal species is so
Lecture Seven 99
perfectly structured as the human being with regard to the

complete organization of the limbs.
Here you should introduce a really vivid description of the
human being’s arms and hands. They have no part in carrying
the organism; the hands do not touch the earth with regard to
anything to do with the body, and they have been transformed
in a way that enables them to grasp objects and undertake
work. Then you move on to the moral element, which has to
do with the will. Awaken in the children through their feelings,
not in theory, a strong picture. “You can, for example, pick up a
piece of chalk with your hand in order to write; you can do this
only because your hand has been transformed to enable it to
work instead of carrying the body. An animal cannot be lazy
about its arms because it does not really have any. When we
speak of an ape as a four-handed creature, it is an inaccurate
way of talking, because the ape really has four armlike legs and
feet and not four hands. Even though these creatures are struc-
tured for the purpose of climbing, this really serves only the
body; their feet have been shaped like hands so that in climbing
they can support the body. The human being’s hands and arms
have become useless to the human body, and this is externally
the most beautiful symbol of the human being’s freedom. There
is no more wonderful symbol of human freedom than these
arms and hands. Human beings can work for the environment
with their hands, and since they eat and nourish themselves,
they can also work for themselves out of their free will.”
By describing the cuttlefish, the mouse, the lamb or the horse,
and the human being, we gradually kindle in the children a
strong sense of the fact that the character of the lower animals is
headlike, that of the higher animals is trunklike, and that of the
human being is limblike. It only inculcates conceit in people if
they are constantly taught that human beings are the most per-
fect beings on earth by virtue of their head. This idea causes
people unwittingly to absorb the idea that the human being is

perfect through laziness, through lethargy. Instinctively they
know that the head is a lazybones resting on the shoulders, not
wanting to move about in the world but letting itself be carried
by the limbs. It is not true that it is through the head, the lazy-
bones of a head, that human beings are perfect beings; they are
perfect in their limbs, which are involved in the world and its
work. You make a person inwardly more moral by saying not
that he or she is perfect by virtue of the lazybones of a head but
that he or she is perfect through the active limbs. Those crea-
tures that are only beings of head and have to move themselves,
like the lower animals, and the creatures that can use their limbs
only in the service of the trunk, like the higher animals, are all
less perfect compared with the human being. They all use their
limbs less freely than can the human being. Their limbs have
only a certain purpose, namely, to serve the trunk. With the
human being, however, one pair of limbs, the hands, is fully sit-
uated in the sphere of human freedom.
You can instill into human beings a healthy feeling for the
world only if you awaken in them the idea that they are perfect
because of their limbs and not because of their head. You can
do this very well through the comparative description of the
cuttlefish, the mouse, the lamb or the horse, and the human
being. You will also realize that you should never exclude the
human being when you describe activities in any of the king-
doms of nature, because in the human being all the activities
of nature are united. We should always keep the human being
in the background when we describe anything in nature. This
is also the reason why we must take the human being as our
starting point when we teach the children about natural science
after they reach the age of nine.
If you observe the human being in the early years, you will
find that something occurs around the age of ten or eleven. It is
Lecture Seven 101
not as obvious as the first step of this process, which took place
in early childhood. When children start to move their limbs with
more awareness, when they begin to walk (even clumsily), when
they start to use their arms and hands purposefully, this is when
they first become aware of the I. The memory will later reach
back to this point, but not beyond. When you hear the child
start to say, “I,” you will realize the beginning of self-awareness in
a way that is clearly noticeable (though it may happen a little
later; there are individual variations, because intentional speech
must first develop). The change in the children’s self-awareness
grows stronger at the age of nine, and you find that they under-
stand much better what you say about the difference between
the human being and the world. Before they reach the age of
nine, the children merge far more thoroughly with the environ-
ment than is the case later, when they begin to distinguish them-
selves from their surroundings. Then you will find that you can
begin to talk a little about matters of the soul and that they will
not listen with such a lack of understanding as they would have
listened earlier. In short, the children’s self-awareness grows
deeper and stronger when they reach this age.
If you come to understand such things, you will notice that
at this age the children begin to use words in a much more
inward way than before, becoming more aware that words
arise from within. Today people are concerned far more about
external than internal phenomena, and consequently they pay
far too little heed to the change that occurs in the ninth or
tenth year. But teachers must pay attention to it. As a result,
they will be able to speak to the children with quite a different
fundamental mood if they put off the teaching of natural his-
tory (which should always compare human beings with the
other kingdoms of nature) until after this transition. While the
children are still more integrated with nature, we can speak to
them about the subjects of natural science only in a narrative
form. After the ninth year, we can present them with the cuttle-
fish, the mouse, the lamb or the horse, and the human being,
and it is then permissible to speak of the relationship of the
animals’ form to the human form.
Before this period in their lives, the children would not be
able to comprehend you if you were to connect the cuttlefish to
the head aspect and the mouse to the trunk, while also finding
in human beings’ limbs the element that raises them above the
other kingdoms of nature. You ought really to make use of
what this special age of the children offers you, because if you
apply natural science lessons in the way I have described, you
will implant into their souls moral concepts that are very firm
and do not falter. You cannot instill moral concepts into the
children by appealing to their intellect; you have to appeal to
their feeling and their will. You will engage the feeling and the
will if you guide the children’s thoughts and feelings to an
understanding of how they themselves are fully human only
when they use their hands for working in the world. You must
also show them how it is through this activity that the human
being is the most perfect creature. You must describe the rela-
tionship between the human head and the cuttlefish, between
the human trunk and the mouse, lamb, or horse. By placing
themselves in the natural order of things in this way, the chil-
dren absorb feelings that later help them understand them-
selves as human beings.
You can implant this particularly important moral element
into the children’s souls if you try to shape the natural history
lessons in a way that will give them no clue that you want to
teach them a moral lesson. But you will not be able to imbue
them with even a trace of anything moral if you teach natural
history as something separate from the human being. If you
describe the cuttlefish, the mouse, the lamb or the horse, or
even the human being in isolation, it would be nothing but a
Lecture Seven 103
set of definitions. You can characterize the human being only

by building the picture of the human being from all the other
organisms and functions in nature. Schiller admired in Goethe
the way his conception of nature led him to build up the
human being in a naïve manner out of all the separate aspects
of nature; he expressed this admiration in the beautiful letter he
wrote to Goethe at the beginning of the 1790s. I have men-
tioned this letter repeatedly because it contains an idea that
ought to be absorbed into our culture—consciousness of the
synthesis of all nature in the human being. Goethe again and
again says that human beings stand at the summit of nature
and there feel themselves to be a whole world of nature. He
also says that the rest of the world reaches an awareness of itself
in the human being.
If you read what I have written, you will find that over and
over again I have included such quotations from Goethe. I did
not quote them because I found them pleasing but because such
ideas must be absorbed into the consciousness of our age. This is
why it grieves me so much that one of the most important edu-
cational writings has remained virtually unknown or at least
bears no fruit in the educational field. Schiller learned good edu-
cational principles from Goethe’s naïve self-education, and he
poured these educational principles into his Aesthetic Education
of Man.3 Much that is fruitful for education is contained in
these letters, if only we can think beyond them and extend the
ideas to their logical conclusions. Schiller arrived at his views
through Goethe’s vision. Just recall how Goethe, being as it were
a representative of civilization implanted into nature, opposed
the educational principles of his environment from earliest
childhood. He could never bring himself to separate the human
3. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Oxford University Press, New York,

1992.
being from the environment. He always looked at the human

being in relationship to nature, and he felt that as a human
being he was one with nature. That is why he disliked his piano
lessons so long as they were conducted in a way that disassoci-
ated them from a relationship with the human being. He started
to take an interest in these lessons only when he was shown the
functions of the different fingers. He took an interest when he
was told, “This is Tommy Thumb, and this is Peter Pointer,”
and shown how Tommy Thumb and Peter Pointer were used for
playing the piano. He always wanted the whole of the human
being to be embedded in the whole of nature.
You will remember something else that I have mentioned.
When he was seven, Goethe built himself an altar to nature. He
took his father’s music stand and placed on it plants from his
father’s herbarium and minerals and crowned it all with a little
incense candle that he lit by focusing the beams of the morning
sun with a magnifying glass. This was an offering to the great
god of nature—a rebellion against everything imposed on him
by education. In the very essence of his nature, Goethe was
always a human being longing to be educated in the way people
ought to be educated today. And it was because Goethe became
this sort of person, after he had schooled himself accordingly,
that he appealed so much to Schiller, who then wrote as he did
about education in his aesthetic letters.
My old friend and teacher Schröer once told me how, when
he was a teacher, he had had to sit on a school commission to
test prospective teachers.4 He had been prevented by circum-
stances from preparing the examination. Instead he asked the
prospective teachers questions about Schiller’s aesthetic letters.
4. Karl Julius Schröer (1825–1900), literary historian and professor at the

school Steiner attended in Vienna; see An Autobiography: Chapters in the
Course of My Life, 1861–1907, pp. 42ff.
Lecture Seven 105
They knew all about all sorts of things—Plato and so on—but

when Schröer started to question them about Schiller’s aes-
thetic letters, they rebelled. Soon the whole of Vienna knew
that Schröer had asked questions about Schiller’s aesthetic let-
ters in the teachers’ examinations. Nobody could understand
what they were about; no one could possibly grasp such things.
If we are looking for really healthy ideas on education, even
rudimentary ideas, we cannot do without returning to such
examples as Schiller’s aesthetic letters and also, for instance, to
Jean Paul’s educational doctrine Levana.5 This work, too, con-
tains an immense number of practical teaching suggestions.
More recently, matters have improved to a certain extent, but it
cannot be said that the kind of impulse that could come from
Schiller’s aesthetic letters and Jean Paul’s teachings has passed
over unadulterated into modern teaching practice.
I have attempted to give you an idea of how you can “read”
from a certain period in a child’s life, at about the age of nine,
what is best done in terms of education at this time. Tomorrow
we shall discuss how we can teach the children what is best
suited to their being at the ages of fourteen and fifteen. In this
way we shall approach an understanding of the way the whole
period from seven to fifteen is structured and what we as teach-
ers and educators should do. The curriculum is built on such
considerations. People today often put the question in the
abstract: How can we develop the child’s capacities? But we
must be quite clear that you first have to know the capacities of
the growing individual before the abstract statement that these
capacities must be developed can have any concrete meaning.
5. Jean Paul (1763–1825), born Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, German writer
of novels and romances, and on educational philosophy (Levana), patrio-
tism, and politics.
Lecture Eight
AUGUST 29, 1919
I have already pointed out that where schools fall under exter-
nal legislation we must obviously agree to compromise with
regard to both religious instruction and the curriculum. But we
must keep clearly in mind what is right and best as a basis for the
curriculum, so that where stipulations force us to do something
unnatural we can perhaps discreetly correct the bad effects.
To find the right curriculum for children aged seven to four-
teen or fifteen is bound up in general with a true knowledge of
child development over this period of time. Yesterday we threw
light on one moment in this development, the moment that falls
between the ages of nine and ten, when children have concluded
their ninth year and are starting out on their tenth. If we follow
the development of the child from the age of seven onward
through the ages of eight and nine, we come to the point before
the tenth year is reached that I characterized as the time when
ego consciousness is strengthened and consolidated. From then
on, we can approach the child with concepts in natural science
of the kind suggested yesterday with the cuttlefish, the mouse,
the lamb or the horse, and the human being. As you have seen,
we must still take account of the interplay between the human
being and the environment and of how the human being is
really a synthesis of all the other realms of nature and must not
yet be sharply detached from these other realms. A great deal of
harm is done to growing children if we fail in their tenth and
Lecture Eight 107
eleventh years to impress upon them again and again, through

the feeling life, that the human being is linked to external nature
and is even a synthesis of the outer world.
Another important phase in the child’s development comes
between the ages of twelve and thirteen. At this time the spirit
and soul elements in the human being are reinforced and
strengthened, that is, those spirit and soul elements that are less
dependent on the ego. What we are accustomed in spiritual sci-
ence to call the astral body permeates the etheric body and
unites with it. Of course, the astral body as an independent
being is not born until puberty, but it manifests itself in a dis-
tinctive way through the etheric body by permeating and invig-
orating it between the twelfth and thirteenth years. This is
another important milestone in a child’s development. If we
approach them in the right way, children begin to develop an
understanding of the impulses that correspond to impulses of
spirit and soul, such as those at work in the outer world as the
forces of history.
I have provided an example of how the activity of these his-
torical forces can be brought within the scope of teaching at the
elementary school level.1 You will have to transpose what I said
to you into childlike language. You can be as childlike as you
want in your expressions, however, and you will achieve nothing
in the way of awakening in the children a proper understanding
of historical impulses if you make historical observations in your
lessons before they have completed their twelfth year. Before
that age, you can tell them about history in the form of sto-
ries—biographies, for instance. These they would be able to
grasp, but they will be unable to grasp historical connections
before they complete their twelfth year. You will do damage if
you fail to observe this turning point. The children will begin to
1. Discussion 7, Discussions with Teachers.

develop a yearning to have explained to them as history what

they have earlier taken in as stories.
If you have told stories to the children—for instance, about a
crusader or some other historical figure—you must try to
transform the material in a way that allows them to see the his-
torical impulses and links. When you note the changes in the
children during this phase of their development and notice
unmistakably that when you develop your lessons properly,
after their twelfth year, the children understand you, it will be
possible to say, “Before the children’s ninth year, I should limit
myself to the artistic element we have discussed. From this, I
will introduce writing and reading and, later, arithmetic. I shall
not make the transition to natural history until after the stage
we discussed yesterday. Until they have reached their twelfth
year I will not teach history, except in the form of stories.”
At this point the children begin to take an inner interest in
great historical connections. This will be quite important for
the future, when it will become more and more distinctly nec-
essary to educate people in an understanding of historical
coherence; up to now they have never really achieved a proper
conception of history. People have first and foremost been
members of economic and national life, in which they have
participated routinely and unthinkingly. They have coped
quite adequately with the requirements and interests of this
economic and national life by knowing a few anecdotes about
rulers and wars—which is not history—and a few dates of
kings and one or two famous people and battles. Lessons in the
future will have to be particularly concerned with the way in
which the cultural life of humankind has developed. They will
have to include appropriate views on the impulses of history,
and these impulses will have to find their proper place in the
curriculum so that they are given at the right moment.
Something else also begins to become comprehensible to
Lecture Eight 109
children when they reach the age of twelve. However clearly

you explain the functioning of the human eye to the children
before this point, they will be unable to understand it properly.
What does it mean to teach children about the functioning of
the human eye? It means showing them how beams of light fall
into the eye and are taken up and refracted by the lens, how
they then pass through the vitreous body and work as a picture
on the rear wall, and so on. You have to describe all these pro-
cesses in terms of physics. You are illustrating a process in phys-
ics that takes place in the human being in one of the sense
organs. If you want to describe this process, you must first
teach the children the concepts that will enable them to take in
this kind description of the eye. This means that you must first
teach them the meaning of the refraction of light beams.
It is quite simple to do so by showing them a lens, explaining
the focus, and demonstrating how light is refracted. But these
are facts of physics that have their place outside the human
being. We can describe them to children in the period between
ages nine and twelve, but we should not apply such descriptions
of physics to the organs of the human being before the children
have reached the age of twelve. Only then do they begin to
assess properly how the external world is continued in the
human being. Before then, they cannot understand this. They
can understand the processes of physics, but they cannot under-
stand how these processes take place within the human being.
The comprehension of the historical impulses of human-
kind and the understanding of nature’s laws of physics working
in the human organism are akin to each other. The real essence
of humanity lives in historical impulses; what is gathered
together in these impulses lives in external historical events
that, in turn, have their effect on individual human beings.
When you describe the human eye, you characterize an activity
of external nature that is also working within the human being.
Both processes require similar powers of comprehension, and

these powers start to develop only in the child’s twelfth year. For
this reason, it will be necessary to arrange the curriculum for
children between the ages of nine and twelve in a way that will
include lessons on the simple concepts of physics necessary for
an understanding of the human being. In addition to natural
history, simple physics will be taught, but the application of the
laws of physics to the human being will wait until after age
twelve. In the same way, stories will be told up to this time and
will then be transformed into history.
My explanations so far refer to the way subjects are intro-
duced. Of course, we can continue to enlarge on physics after the
twelfth year. Neither physics nor natural history should be intro-
duced before the children reach age nine, however, and neither
history nor lessons involving physiology, that is, descriptions of
human functions, should start before the end of the twelfth year.
If you take into account that comprehension is something that
does not simply blossom in the human intellect but always also
includes the feelings and the will, you will not be confused by
what I just said. If people do not consider such things, it is sim-
ply because they have illusions. You can present the human intel-
lect, in a makeshift way, with historical or physiological facts
before age twelve, but by doing so you ruin human nature;
strictly speaking, you make it unsuitable for the whole of life.
But between the ages of nine and twelve, you can gradually
introduce the concepts of refraction and the formation of images
through lenses or other instruments. You could perhaps discuss
how an opera glass works. You can also talk with the children
about the way in which a clock functions and explore the differ-
ences between a pendulum clock and a pocket watch and other
examples along these lines. Before they reach the age of twelve,
however, you should not describe to them how refraction and
image formation can also be applied to the human eye.
Lecture Eight 111
All this will provide you with points of reference from which
you can learn how the material to be taught should be distrib-
uted in the curriculum so that the capacities of the children are
developed in the right way. There is more to be observed from
this point of view. To a certain extent, it is important that we
should not move too far away from life in our lessons, though
we should not take excessive account of the trivialities of life
either. One might have the following conversation with a child.
You might ask: “What have you got on your feet?” And you
would expect the reply “A pair of boots.” You would then ask,
“What are the boots for?” The child would respond, “For me to
put on.” Some teachers might think of this as an object lesson,
but it is nothing but a triviality. The object lessons occasionally
described in books on education are very boring to children at a
subconscious level and as a result cause much damage in them.
Remaining too close to life in this way and constantly bringing
things to awareness that could very well remain in the uncon-
scious, raising activities that are merely habitual too much into
consciousness, is something we should not allow ourselves.
On the other hand, we need not lose all contact with life and
teach the children empty abstractions too early. This is espe-
cially important for physics lessons. In any case, physics will
offer opportunities for interweaving matters that are close to
life with those that are initially rather removed from ordinary
life. You should therefore make sure to develop the concepts of
physics from life itself. As much as your inventiveness will
allow, you should give the children real experiences. For
instance, after having lit the stove in the classroom, you would
show how the floor remains cold even after the air is warm. In
this way, you point out a fact of life. Beginning with that fact,
you can go on to explain how the air naturally becomes warm
first near the stove rather than near the ceiling, but then the
warm air always rises, making the cold air fall.
You must describe the process in the following way. The air
first becomes warm below the stove and then rises to the ceil-
ing, making the cold air fall. This is why a room remains cold
near the floor even when the air near the ceiling has been warm
for some time. In this way, you have started from a fact of life,
and from there you seek the transition to the fact that warm air
expands and cold air contracts. This statement takes you far-
ther away from life. Another example would be a discussion of
the lever in physics. It is not wise to present just the abstract
lever. Start with a pair of scales and move on from there to the
lever. Start with an object that is used in everyday life and pro-
ceed to whatever can be extrapolated from it in physics.
I must point out to you that a considerable amount of what is
included in our concepts of physics wreaks havoc in the child
and that a great deal depends on the teacher’s knowing what is
right and trying to be mature in judgment. You cannot avoid
saying to the bigger children: “Here you have an electrical gener-
ator; what I have here is a frictional electrical generator. I can
make electricity by rubbing certain objects together, but I must
first wipe the objects carefully because they have to be very dry.
If they are wet, the experiment will not work, and no electricity
will be made.” Then you enlarge on the reasons why electricity
cannot be produced with wet instruments. And you go on to
explain how lightning occurs, pointing out that it is also an elec-
trical process. There are many people who claim that clouds rub
against each other and that the resulting friction causes lightning
as an electrical discharge. The children will perhaps believe this
because the teacher actually believes it, but in their subconscious
a special process takes place of which they are unaware.
The children say to themselves: “My teacher wipes the instru-
ments before rubbing them together to make electricity, just to
make sure that they are not wet, and then tells me that if clouds
rub together, electricity is made. But clouds are wet.” Children
Lecture Eight 113
notice such inconsistencies. And much of the disharmony in life

stems from the fact that children are told such contradictions.
These contradictions ought to arise outside in the world; they
have no place in our thinking. Because human knowledge and
perception are too shallow today, such contradictions, which
really tear apart the human unconscious, continually crop up in
what we tell children and, later, young people. We must take
care that what we bring consciously to the children does not
contain too much of what in their subconscious they will imag-
ine differently. It will not be our task as teachers to eliminate
from science such nonsense as is maintained concerning the link
between lightning and electricity in physics. When we deal with
more obvious matters, however, we should always remind our-
selves that we influence not only the children’s conscious being
but also their subconscious being.
How do we take the subconscious into consideration? As
teachers, we must do this by trying not to adjust matters to
make them understandable for children. I have mentioned else-
where what this involves. You must develop in yourselves capac-
ities that allow you, at the moment you enter upon a subject
with the children, to become as absorbed by the subject as the
child is by the lesson, regardless of the subject you are treating.
You should not allow yourself to be filled with the thought that
you know a great deal more but that you are arranging it to suit
the children. You should not allow yourself to believe that you
are quite superior to the children and prepare everything you
want to say to them so that it will be suitable for them. No. You
must have the ability to transform yourself in such a way that
the children literally wake up through your lesson and that you
yourself become a child with the children, but not in a childish
way. People caring for children often err in this respect, talking
baby language with their charges. If the child says, “Dada,”
they also say, “Dada,” instead of “Father.” It is not a matter of
becoming childish with the children in a superficial way; we

must transform what is more mature into something childlike.
To be capable of doing this in the right way, we have to look
rather more deeply into the nature of the human being. We
have to take seriously the fact that precisely with regard to their
most important spiritual characteristic human beings become
productive by retaining the childlike element all their lives. We
are poets and artists if we can always relive in ourselves the
activity of the child with our more mature nature. To be forever
a steady person, unable any longer to use in an inner childlike
way our thinking, feeling, and willing (which have absorbed
more mature concepts now that we are older than thirty), is not
a suitable mood of life for a teacher. The proper mood of life
for teachers is always to be able to return to childhood with
everything they experience and with everything they learn.
They will not return to childhood by describing in baby lan-
guage something new they have learned; they will return
because with every new fact they will experience as much
delight and intense joy as the children do when they perceive
something new. In a word, it is the soul and spirit that should
return to childhood, not the external physical manifestation.
Then, too, a great deal will depend on the atmosphere that is
created between the teacher and the students. It is right, for
instance, if you speak about life and about nature in such a way
that you take as much pleasure in it as the children themselves
do and are as much amazed as the children. Let me give you an
example. You have all learned some physics and thus know a
fair amount about what is called Morse telegraphy. You know
what happens when a telegram is sent from one place to
another. You understand how the telegram operator uses the
different devices, pressing the Morse key for a short time or for
longer, thus closing the circuit for shorter or longer moments,
whereas the circuit is interrupted when the operator does not
Lecture Eight 115
press the key. You know that the actual Morse telegraph appa-
ratus is linked to the circuit by an iron lever attracted by a coil
that contains an electromagnet and that the so-called relay is
connected into this current. You know that with the help of a
wire one such apparatus at one station is linked with another at
another station, so that what is produced at the first station is
reproduced at the second. By connecting the current for
shorter or longer moments, I cause a signal to be received at the
next station that, when it is transposed, can be read by the
operator there. The shorter or longer bursts of current become
visible as impressions on a strip of paper, as dots or dashes. The
strip of paper runs through rollers. You see, for instance, a dot
and then after an interruption three dots, and so on. The
alphabet consists of dots and dashes. The letter a is represented
by a dot followed by a dash; b is dash, dot, dot; t is just a dash;
and so on. In this way, you can read what is transmitted from
one station to the next.
Yet everything that is said about this telegraphy apparatus is
really only a question of intellectual consideration. You cer-
tainly do not require many soul forces to make comprehensible
all the mechanical processes that take place when the mecha-
nism is permeated by electricity, which itself can so far be
explained only hypothetically by science. But one thing does
remain a miracle; such things really can be described as mira-
cles. And I must say, when I think of the link that is created
between the Morse apparatus at one station and that at another
station, it never fails to fill me with wonder when I realize how
the circuit is closed. The electrical circuit is not closed by
means of a wire running from one station to the next and
another wire running back again. This would also be possible,
and breaking the closed circuit could then effect the interrup-
tion. But this closed circuit containing the Morse apparatus is
not created by wires that run back and forth; only one part of
the current runs along a wire. At each station the wire ends in a
metal plate in the ground, so that the Earth itself provides the
link that could be made through a wire. The Earth itself does
what the other half of the wire would otherwise accomplish.
Whenever you think of how a Morse apparatus at one sta-
tion is linked to another at another station, you are reminded
of the miracle that makes the whole Earth into a mediator, tak-
ing the electric current as though into its care and duly deliver-
ing it at the next station. The Earth itself mediates in this way.
All the explanations that exist for this process are hypothetical.
But the important point about our human attitude toward it is
that we should be able ever and again to feel the miraculous
nature of this fact, that we should not become blunted in our
ability to grasp the processes of physics with our feelings. Then
when we explain these things to the children, we shall find the
mood that allows us to recapture the way we first grasped such
facts. When we explain a phenomenon of physics to a child
who is full of wonder, we shall ourselves become children full
of wonder. Such marvels are hidden in all phenomena, includ-
ing the processes of physics that take place in the world.
Imagine for a moment that you are giving the following les-
son. Over there is a bench and on it is, let us say, a ball. I
quickly pull the bench away, and the ball falls to the ground.
How would most teachers today explain this to a child? They
would say, “The ball is attracted to the earth; if it is unsup-
ported, it is overcome by the force of gravity.” But that does
not really explain anything. Saying that the ball is subject to the
force of gravity is really meaningless. It is one of those verbal
definitions we have already mentioned. Again, physicists say
that nothing is known about gravity and its nature, yet they
speak of it anyway. But we cannot avoid speaking of gravity; we
must mention it. Otherwise, when our students enter life they
may some day be asked to explain gravity—perhaps while
Lecture Eight 117
being evaluated for a job. Just imagine what would happen if a

fifteen-year-old knew nothing of gravity; there would be a ter-
rible fuss. So we must explain gravity to children; we must not
be foolish enough to close our eyes to the demands of the
world as it is today. But by working on their subconscious, we
can awaken beautiful concepts in the children.
Because we have established the groundwork, we can make
this clear to them; “Here you have the intake of an air pump
containing no air. If you remove the stopper, air flows in
quickly, filling what had been empty. This is related to what
happens also in the case of the effects of gravity. When we pull
the bench quickly from the ball, something flows in there as
well. The only difference is that in one case, outside air flows
into an empty space, whereas in the other case the effect works
in only one direction” [toward Earth]. Now you compare these
two phenomena.2 Do not give children verbal definitions but
show them the connections between the concepts and the phe-
nomena related to air and those related to solid bodies.
Once we have grasped the concept of solid bodies flowing in
the direction in which they tend when not prevented, we can
dispense with the concept of air flowing into empty space.
Healthier concepts would arise than those that fill the world
today—such as Professor Einstein’s complicated theory of rela-
tivity. I mention this as a passing comment on the present state
of our civilization, for I cannot avoid pointing out how many
harmful ideas live in our culture (such as the theory of relativ-
ity, especially in its most recent variation). These ideas run a
ruinous course if the child becomes a research scientist. You
have now been introduced to a large part of the basis and
method for working out the curriculum.
2. See lecture 7, The Foundations of Human Experience.

Lecture Nine
AUGUST 30, 1919
The children coming to the Waldorf school will be of widely

differing ages. When we start the lessons in the different
classes, we shall have to take particular account of this age
range, and we must also not lose sight of another, related point.
Unfortunately, we cannot immediately found a university with
all the usual faculties to continue from the point where the
Waldorf school leaves off. It will be up to us to prepare our stu-
dents for the other institutes of further education that they will
have to attend when they leave the Waldorf school and before
they step out into life. We must provide our students by the
time they leave with the necessary qualifications for whatever
further education will be suitable for them when they go out
into life. We shall achieve our aim and accomplish our task,
despite the need to conform to these restrictions, if we can put
into practice the educational principles we have established in
the present cultural epoch of humankind's development. We
shall be able to achieve this aim, particularly with regard to the
older children, who will soon have to be sent away to the other
institutions of life, only if we apply a golden rule—to teach
economically.
We shall be able to teach economically, particularly the thir-
teen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-olds, if we carefully eliminate
everything that is merely ballast for human soul development
at that age and can bear no fruits for life. For instance, we shall
Lecture Nine 119
have to make room in our timetable at least for Latin and pos-
sibly also for Greek. We must, in any case, really come to grips
with language teaching, for this will be a most significant fea-
ture of our method as a whole. Let us look at the fact that you
will be teaching students who will already have been taught
French or Latin up to a certain stage. Their lessons will have
been conducted in a certain way. You will have to spend your
first lesson or even your first week finding out what they
already know. You will have to repeat with them what they
have done so far, but you must do so judiciously so that each,
according to his or her capacity, will benefit even from this
repetition.
You will achieve a great deal simply by taking into account
that what delays you more than anything else in teaching for-
eign languages is translation from the foreign language into the
mother tongue and vice versa. An enormous amount of time is
wasted when, for instance, so much translation from Latin into
German and from German back into Latin is expected of
grammar school students. Instead, there should be much more
reading, and the students should spend much more time
expressing their own thoughts in the foreign language. How
then will you set about teaching a foreign language, let us say
French, on the basis of this rule?
Let us first consider the older children to whom this will
apply—those who are thirteen and fourteen. For them you
will first have to select carefully what you want to read in a
particular language. Select passages for reading and then call
on the students one by one to read them out loud. You will
save their time and energy if you do not begin by insisting that
they translate the passages into German but instead make sure
that each child reads properly in terms of pronunciation and
so on. In the classes when you want to review work and cover
new material, it is still good not to require translation but to
let the students give a free rendering of the content in the pas-
sage they have read.
Just allow children to repeat in their own words what the
passage says while you listen carefully for any omissions that
might indicate that they have not understood the excerpt. It is
more convenient for you, of course, simply to let the children
translate, for then you soon see where one of them cannot go
on. It is less expeditious to listen for something to be omitted
instead of just waiting until the child comes to a stop, but you
can nevertheless find out by this means whether something has
not been understood, if a phrase is not rendered correctly in
the mother tongue. There will be children who make a very
capable rendering of the passage and others whose rendering is
much freer in the use of their own words; this does not matter.
This is the way we should discuss the text with the children.
Next we tackle the opposite procedure. First, we discuss a
subject with the children in their mother tongue, a subject that
they can follow along with us in their thoughts and feelings.
Then we can try to let the children repeat freely (depending on
how far advanced they already are) in the foreign language
what we have been discussing with them. In this way we shall
discover how well these children, who have come to us from all
sorts of classes, know the foreign language.
You cannot teach a foreign language in school without really
working at grammar, both ordinary grammar and syntax. It is
particularly necessary for children older than twelve to be made
conscious of what lies in grammar, but here, too, you can pro-
ceed very circumspectly. This morning in our study of the
human being I said that in ordinary life we form conclusions
and then proceed to judgment and concept.1 Although you
cannot present the children directly with this logical method, it
1. See lecture 9, The Foundations of Human Experience.

Lecture Nine 121
will underlie your teaching of grammar. Particularly with the

help of the lessons in foreign languages, you will do well to dis-
cuss matters of the world with the children in a way that will
allow grammar lessons to arise organically. It is purely a matter
of structuring such a thing properly. Start by shaping a com-
plete sentence and not more than a sentence. Point to what is
going on outside—at this very moment you would have an
excellent example.
You could very well combine grammar with a foreign lan-
guage by letting the children express in Latin and French and
German, for example, “It is raining.” Start by eliciting from the
children the statement “It is raining.” Then point out to them
(they are, after all, older children) that they are expressing a
pure activity when they say: “It rains.” Now you can proceed to
another sentence; you can include, if you like, foreign lan-
guages, for you will save a great deal of time and energy if you
also work this method into the foreign language lesson. You say
to the children: “Instead of the scene outside in the rain, imag-
ine to yourselves a meadow in springtime.” Lead the children
until they say of that meadow, “It is greening, it greens.” And
then take them further until they transform the sentence “It is
greening,” into the sentence “The meadow is greening.” And,
finally, lead them still further until they can transform the sen-
tence “The meadow is greening,” into the concept of a “green
meadow.”
If you stimulate these thoughts within the children one after
the other in your language lessons, you will not be pedantically
teaching them syntax and logic. You will be guiding the whole
soul constellation of the children in a certain direction; you will
be teaching them in a discreet way what should arise in their
souls. You introduce sentences beginning “It” or “It is” to the
children, sentences that really live only in the domain of activ-
ity and exist as sentences in themselves, without any subject or
predicate. These are sentences that belong to the living realm of

conclusions—they are, indeed, abbreviated conclusions. With
an appropriate example, you take the further step of finding a
subject: “The meadow greens” or “The meadow that is green.”
Here you have taken the step of forming a judgment sentence.
You will agree that it would be difficult to construct a similar
judgment sentence for the sentence “It rains.” Where would
you find the subject for “It rains”? It is not possible. By practic-
ing in this way with the children, we enter linguistic realms
about which philosophers have written a great deal. Miklošic,
the scholar of Slavic languages, started writing about sentences
without subjects, followed by Brentano, and then Marty in
Prague.2 They all sought to find the rules connected with sub-
jectless sentences, such as “It rains,” “It snows,” “It lightens,”
“It thunders,” and so on—for out of their logic they could not
understand where sentences without subjects originated.
Sentences without subjects, as a matter of fact, arise from the
very intimate links we have with the world in some respects.
Human beings are a microcosm embedded in a macrocosm,
and their activity is not separated from the activity of the
world. When it rains, for instance, we are very closely linked
with the world, particularly if we have no umbrella; we cannot
separate ourselves from it, and we get just as wet as the pave-
ments and houses around us. In such a case we do not separate
ourselves from the world; we do not invent a subject but name
only the activity. Where we can be somewhat more detached
from the world, where we can more easily remove ourselves
2. Franz Xaver von Miklošic (1831-1891), a Slavic philogist and professor

in Vienna; considered founder of modern Slavic philology. Franz Brentano
(1838-1917), German philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and professor in
Würzburg and Vienna; wrote on “act psychology,” or intentionalism, as well
as on Aristotle. Anton Marty (1847-1914) was a student of Brentano.
Lecture Nine 123
from it, as in the case of the meadow, there we can invent a

subject for our sentence “The meadow is greening.”
From this example you see that in the way we speak to the
children we can always take account of the interplay between
the human being and the environment. By presenting the chil-
dren (particularly in the lessons devoted to foreign languages)
with examples in which grammar is linked to the practical logic
of life, we try to discover how much they know of grammar and
syntax. But in the foreign language lessons, please avoid first
working through a reading passage and subsequently pulling the
language to pieces. Make every effort to develop the grammati-
cal side independently. There was a time when foreign language
textbooks contained fantastic sentences that took account only
of the proper application of grammatical rules. Gradually this
came to be regarded as ridiculous, and sentences taken more
from life were included in foreign language textbooks instead.
But here, too, the middle path is better than the two extremes.
If you use only sentences from ordinary life, you will not be
able to teach pronunciation very well unless you also use sen-
tences like the ones we spoke yesterday as an exercise, for
instance:
Lulling leader limply

liplessly laughing
loppety lumpety
lackety lout.3
These sentences consider only the essence of language. When

you develop grammar and syntax with the children, you will
3. See beginning of discussion 8 in Discussions with Teachers. This version

was adapted for English speakers from the original: “Lalle Lieder lieblich, /
Lipplicher Laffe, / Lappiger, lumpiger, / Laichiger Lurch.”
have to make up sentences specifically to illustrate this or that

grammatical rule. But you will have to see to it that the chil-
dren do not write down these sentences illustrating grammati-
cal rules. Instead of being written down in their notebooks,
they should be worked on; they come into being, but they are
not preserved. This procedure contributes enormously to the
economical use of your lessons, particularly foreign language
lessons, for in this way the children absorb the rules in their
feelings and after a while drop the examples.
If they are allowed to write down the examples, they absorb
the form of the example too strongly. In terms of teaching
grammar, the examples ought to be dispensable; they should
not be carefully written down in notebooks, for only the rule
should finally remain. It is beneficial to use exercises and read-
ing passages for the living language, for actual speech, and, on
the other hand, to let the children formulate their own
thoughts in the foreign language, using more the kind of sub-
ject that crops up in daily life. For grammar, however, you use
sentences that, from the start, you intend the children to for-
get, and therefore you do not let them do what is always help-
ful in memorizing—write them down. All the activity involved
in teaching the children grammar and syntax with the help of
sentences takes place in living conclusions; it should not
descend into the dreamlike state of habitual actions but should
continue to play in fully conscious life.
Naturally, this method introduces into the lessons an ele-
ment that makes teaching somewhat strenuous. But you can-
not avoid the fact that you will have to make a certain effort,
particularly in the lessons with the students who come into
the older classes. You will have to proceed very economically,
and yet this economy will actually benefit only the students.
You yourselves will need to spend a great deal of time invent-
ing all the techniques that will help make the lessons as spare
Lecture Nine 125
as possible. By and large, then, let grammar and syntax lessons

be conversational. It is not a good idea to give children actual
books of grammar and syntax in the form in which they exist
today; they also contain examples, but examples, on the
whole, should be discussed and not written. Only the rules
should be written down in the notebooks the children use for
learning regular grammar and syntax.
It will be exceedingly economical and you will also do the
children an enormous amount of good if on one day you dis-
cuss a particular rule of grammar in a language with the help of
an example you have invented. Then, the next day or the day
after that, you return to this rule in the same language lesson
and let the children use their own imaginations to find an
example. Do not underestimate the educational value of such a
method. Teaching is very much a matter of subtleties. It is
vastly different whether you merely question children on a rule
of grammar and let them repeat from their notebooks the
examples you have dictated or whether you make up examples
specially intended to be forgotten and then ask the children to
find their own examples. This activity is immensely educa-
tional. Even if you have in your class the worst young scamps,
who never pay any attention at all, you will soon see what hap-
pens when you set them the task of finding examples to fit a
rule of syntax. (And you can indeed succeed if you yourself are
fully alert as you teach.) They will start to take pleasure in these
examples—they will especially enjoy the activity of making
them up themselves.
When the children come back to school after the long sum-
mer holidays, having played out of doors for weeks on end, you
will have to realize that they will have little inclination to sit
quietly in class and listen attentively to things that they are
expected to remember. Even if you find this behavior rather
disturbing during the first week or two, if you conduct your
lessons, particularly the foreign language lessons, in a way that

lets the children share in the soul activity of making up exam-
ples, you will discover among them after three or four weeks a
number who enjoy making up such examples just as much as
they enjoyed playing outdoors. But you, too, must take care to
make up examples and not hesitate to make the children aware
of this.
Once they have gotten into the swing of this activity, it is
very good if the children want to go on and on. It might hap-
pen that while one is giving an example, another calls out: “I
have one too.” And then they all want a turn to share their
examples. It is then helpful if you say at the end of the lesson:
“I am very pleased that you like doing this just as much as you
enjoyed romping outdoors.” Such a remark echoes within the
children; they carry it with them all the way home from school
and tell it to their parents at dinner. You really must say things
to the children that they will want to tell their parents at the
next meal. And if you succeed in interesting them so much
that they ask their mothers or fathers to make up an example
for this rule, you really have carried off the prize. You can
achieve such successes if you throw yourself heart and soul into
your teaching.
Just consider what a difference it makes if you discuss with
the children in a spirited way the process forming “It rains,” “It
greens,” “The meadow is greening,” and “The green meadow”
instead of developing grammar and syntax in the usual way.
You would not point out that this is an adjective and this is a
verb and that if a verb stands alone there is no sentence—in
short, you would not piece things together in the way that is
often done in grammar books. Instead you would develop the
theme in a lively lesson. Compare this living way of teaching
grammar with the way it is so often taught today. The Latin or
French teacher comes into the classroom. The children get out
Lecture Nine 127
their Latin or French books. They have finished their home-

work, and now they are to translate; afterward they will read.
Soon all their bones ache because the seats are so hard. If
proper teaching methods were practiced, there would be no
need to take such care in designing chairs and desks. The fact
that so much care has had to be lavished on the making of seats
and desks is proof that education has not been conducted sen-
sibly. If children are really taken up in their lessons, the class is
so lively that even if they are sitting down, they do not sit
firmly. We should be delighted if our children do not sit down
firmly, for only those who are themselves sluggish want a class
of children to remain firmly seated, after which they drag
themselves home aching in every limb.
Particular account must be taken of these matters in gram-
mar and syntax lessons. Imagine that the children now have to
translate; grammar and syntax are worked out from the very
things of life they ought to be enjoying. Afterward they are
most unlikely to go home and say to their fathers: “We're read-
ing such a lovely book; let's do some translating together.” It
really is important not to lose sight of the principle of econ-
omy—it will serve you particularly well in your teaching of for-
eign languages.
We must see to it, of course, that our teaching of grammar
and syntax is fairly complete. We shall have to discover the gaps
in the previous experience of the students who are coming to us
from all sorts of other classes. Our first task will be to close the
gaps, particularly in grammar and syntax, so that after a few
weeks we shall have brought a class to a stage where we can
proceed. If we teach in the way I have described (and we are
quite capable of doing so if we are totally involved in the les-
sons and if we ourselves are interested in them), we shall be giv-
ing the children what they will need to enable them to pass the
usual college entrance examinations later on. And we impart to
the children a great deal else that they would not receive in
ordinary elementary or secondary schools, lessons that make
them strong for life and that will serve them throughout life.
It would be particularly beneficial in teaching foreign lan-
guages if the lessons are organized so that they allow the various
languages that children must learn to coexist. An enormous
amount of time is lost when children of thirteen, fourteen, and
fifteen are taught Latin by one teacher, French by another, and
English by a third. Very much is gained when one teacher
develops a thought with a student in one language, then that
same thought is developed by another teacher in another lan-
guage, and so on. One language thus abundantly supports the
other. Of course, this can be accomplished only when the nec-
essary resources are available—teachers in this case. Whatever
is available should be utilized fully. The support that one lan-
guage gives another should be taken into account. This way, in
grammar and syntax lessons it is possible to point constantly
from one language to another, and this touches on a point that
is exceedingly important for the students.
They learn a subject far better if they have in their souls the
method of applying it in a number of directions. You will be
able to say to them: “Now you have spoken a German sentence
and a Latin sentence. In a German sentence, if we are speaking
of ourselves, we can hardly ever leave out the ‘I,’ but in the
Latin sentence the ‘I’ is contained in the verb.” You need not go
any further. Indeed, it would not be good to go any further.
But it is wise just to touch on this fact so that the student gains
a certain feeling for it; then a force will emanate from this feel-
ing that will work as a living faculty for understanding other
elements of grammar. Please absorb this fact and think it over
very deeply: that it is possible in a stimulating, living lesson to
develop capacities in the children that you need for teaching.
This is indeed so.
Lecture Nine 129
Say, for example, that you have touched upon something

without pedantically enlarging on it. If you have said to the
children, “Latin does not say ‘I’ because it is included in the
verb, but the German language does say it,” then for a moment
a faculty is awakened in the children that is otherwise not
there. At this moment the faculty is awakened, and after this
sense has awakened, you can work at grammatical rules more
easily with the children than if you had to draw on their ordi-
nary state of soul. You will have to think how you can create
the aptitudes you want for a certain lesson. The children need
not have the full measure of capacities you intend to use; but
you must have the skill to call to life such capacities that can
later fade away again when the children leave the classroom.
This technique can be applied specifically to the teaching of
foreign languages in the following form. You first have the chil-
dren read aloud, paying attention to proper pronunciation—
rather than giving too many pronunciation rules, you read a
section and then let the children read after you. Then they
retell the passage they have read, forming their own thoughts
about it and expressing them in different languages. Quite sep-
arately you teach the lessons on grammar and syntax with rules
to be remembered and examples to be forgotten. There you
have the framework of our language teaching.
Lecture Ten
SEPTEMBER 1, 1919
Let us try to proceed with our treatment of teaching meth-

ods by keeping one eye on the curriculum and the other on
what will be the actual educational content within it. The cur-
riculum will not contain all subjects at first, for we shall build
up the way we view things by degrees.1
I started by giving you considerations that allowed us to find
characteristics belonging to the various stages of teaching. How
many such stages can be distinguished from the beginning of
school until the ages of fourteen or fifteen? We have seen that
an important turning point occurs at about age ten. We can say
that the first stage of schooling lasts until the ninth year. What
do we do during that period of time? Our starting point will be
the artistic realm. We shall work musically and in painting and
drawing with the children in the way we have discussed. We
shall allow writing to proceed gradually out of painting and
drawing. Step by step the forms of writing will arise out of the
forms of our drawings, and then we shall move on to reading.
It is important for you to understand the reasons for this
sequence so that you do not start with reading and then link it
with writing but rather progress from writing to reading. Writ-
ing is, in a sense, more alive than reading. Reading isolates
human beings very much and draws them away from the
1. See Steiner’s lectures on curriculum in Discussions with Teachers.

Lecture Ten 131
world. In writing we have not yet ceased to imitate universal

forms if we let it arise out of drawing. Printed letters have
indeed become extraordinarily abstract, but they are derived
from written letters, and so we, too, let them arise from the
written letters of our lessons. It is entirely right if, at least for
writing lessons, you keep the thread intact that leads from the
drawn shape to the written letter, so that the children still sense
the original drawn form in the letters. In this way you over-
come what is so alien to the world in writing. In the process of
finding their way into writing, the children assimilate an ele-
ment that is very alien to the world. But when we link the writ-
ten shapes to the universal forms—when we say, for example,
that f stands for fish and so on—we lead them back toward the
world. And it is so very important that we do not sever the
children's links with the world. As we go farther back in civili-
zation, the links we find that bind the human being to the
world become more alive. You need only look with your souls
at one particular image to understand what I mean.
Instead of seeing me here talking to you, imagine that you
are in ancient Greece, where a rhapsodist is reciting Homer to
an audience in that strange style we no longer use—part song,
part speech. Imagine a stenographer sitting by the side of this
rhapsodist reciting Homer. What a strange scene—completely
impossible. Impossible, if only for the simple reason that the
ancient Greeks had a very different memory and did not need
anything so far removed from the world as the shapes of short-
hand to remember what came to them through speech. You
can see from this that an exceedingly destructive element con-
stantly interferes in our culture. We need this destructive ele-
ment. In the whole of our cultural life we cannot possibly do
without shorthand, but we should be aware that there is some-
thing destructive in it. What in our cultural life is this awful
habit of writing everything down in shorthand? It is as though
we were no longer able to regulate our appropriate rhythm

between waking and sleeping and were to use our sleep time to
carry on all kinds of activities so as to implant in our soul life
something that it no longer takes in naturally. By using short-
hand, we retain something in our culture that, if left to our-
selves with our present natural aptitudes, we would cease to
notice and, in fact, forget. We thus keep something artificially
awake in our culture that destroys it just as much as all-night
studying ruins the health of overzealous students. For this rea-
son, our culture is no longer truly healthy.
We must realize that we have already crossed the Rubicon—
that was in ancient Greek times. Humankind has passed the
point when we had an absolutely healthy culture. Now our cul-
ture will become ever more unhealthy, and human beings will
more and more have to find within education a healing process
against all the things that make them sick in their environ-
ment. We must not allow ourselves to indulge in illusions
about this. For this reason it is infinitely important to connect
writing with drawing and to teach writing before reading.
Somewhat later we bring in arithmetic. Since there is no exact
point in the development of the child when it is essential to
begin arithmetic, we can fit it in among the other subjects. We
can start later with arithmetic and build its fundamentals into
the curriculum later; but we start in the way I have described. At
the first stage, the curriculum will always include foreign lan-
guage lessons, because, from a cultural point of view, they are
necessary. For children of this age group, foreign language les-
sons must involve only learning to speak that language.
Once children have reached the second stage, from ages ten to
about thirteen, we begin to develop increased self-awareness in
them through grammar. Through the change the children have
experienced, as I described it here, they are now able to take in
what can grow out of grammar. At this time we deal principally
Lecture Ten 133
with word inflections. Then we make a start with the natural

history of the animal kingdom in the way I outlined with the
cuttlefish, mouse, and human being. Later, we follow with the
plant kingdom, as you will demonstrate to me this afternoon.2
During this stage of the child's development we can also move
on to geometry. Before this stage, all that we later teach as geom-
etry is contained within drawing. With drawing we can elaborate
the triangle, the square, the circle, and the line for the child. The
forms are developed through drawing; we draw them and then
say: “This is a triangle, and this is a square.” But the element of
geometry that is added—not before the ninth year—is the search
for the relationships between forms. Foreign languages continue
as well, and the more grammatical side of language is introduced.
Finally, we introduce the children to physics. At the third stage,
leading up to ages fifteen and sixteen, we start to teach syntax;
children are really ready to study syntax only at about twelve
years of age. Before that age, we treat in an instinctive way what
can lead the children to the forming of sentences.
The time has also come when we can study the mineral king-
dom using the forms of geometry. We discuss the mineral king-
dom by always linking it to physics, which we also apply to the
human being as I have illustrated in the refraction of light
through the lens in the eye. We introduce both physics and
chemistry, and we also make a start on history. We can enrich
the study of geography with natural history by using physics to
link them, and with geometry through the drawing of maps.
Finally, we show its connections to history, that is, how the dif-
ferent peoples have developed their characters. These studies
are conducted during the whole of these two stages in child
development. Foreign languages continue and can now be
extended to include syntax.
2. See discussion 10 in Discussions with Teachers.

Naturally, a number of issues will have to be taken carefully

into consideration. We cannot study music with the little chil-
dren when there are other children in the same classroom who
need absolute quiet because they are supposed to be learning a
lesson. Instead, we must paint and draw with the little ones in
the morning and study music in the afternoon. In other words,
we will allocate the available space in the school so that one sub-
ject does not disturb another. We cannot expect poems to be
recited or a history lesson to be conducted when the little chil-
dren in the next room are playing horns. These, too, are matters
that are linked with the structure of the curriculum, and in estab-
lishing our school we have to carefully determine which subjects
should be taken up in the morning and which in the afternoon.
Now that we know the three stages of the curriculum, we see
that we can determine the aptitudes of the children. We have to
compromise, but for the moment let me assume that our situa-
tion is ideal; later I will look at the curriculum of modern
schools so that we can strike an adequate compromise. It is ideal
to have a less sharp differentiation between the classes within
each stage of development than between the stages themselves.
We will imagine that a uniform progression through the school
years can take place only between the first and second and
between the second and third stages. We will discover that the
so-called less gifted children usually take longer to understand.
In each year's age group at the first stage there will be more
capable students who grasp things sooner and digest them later,
and less gifted students, who have difficulties at first but in the
end also understand. We shall certainly experience this phe-
nomenon, and for this reason we should refrain from making
premature judgments as to which children are particularly
gifted and which are less so. I have stressed before that we will be
teaching children who have already attended a variety of classes
elsewhere. Dealing with them will be all the more difficult the
Lecture Ten 135
older they are. To a great degree, we will be able to remold what

has been spoiled in them if only we make sufficient effort. After
introducing foreign languages to the children—Latin, French,
English, Greek—as I have summarized, we should lose no time
in starting to engage in an activity the children enjoy most of all.
We must let them carry on conversations together in the appro-
priate language while the teacher does no more than guide the
process. You will find that they take tremendous delight in con-
versing together in a foreign language while the teacher does
nothing except make corrections or at most guide the conversa-
tion. If one of them says particularly boring things, for instance,
the student could be diverted to a more interesting topic. The
teacher's presence of mind will have to serve particularly well
here. You must really experience the children before you as a
choir that you will conduct (though, of course, this must be
done inwardly, and not as an orchestra conductor).
Then you must also ascertain which poems and other recita-
tion pieces the children have been taught previously and what
they remember, so that you can draw these poems from their
memories like a treasure. To this treasure they have stored in
their memories you link whatever grammar and syntax they
still need to learn. It is extremely important that the children
should retain what they have in their memories in the way of
poems and so on and that they connect to them the rules of
grammar and syntax they need to master later. I have said
already that it is not beneficial when their memories are ill
treated through writing out the sentences used in grammar les-
sons in order to learn rules. These sentences must be forgotten,
but what is learned through the sentences must be coupled
with what the children have stored in their memories. In this
way, what is retained in their memories will help them gain an
increasing command of the language. If later on they want to
write a letter or talk to someone in that language, they should
be able to call to mind rapidly the appropriate turns of phrase

they have mastered in this way. Taking such things into
account is part of the economy of teaching.
When teaching foreign languages, you have to know what
hinders progress. If you read a passage aloud to your class while
they follow the text in their books, it is nothing but time elimi-
nated from their lives. It is the worst thing you could possibly
do. The right way is for the teacher to relate freely whatever is
to be put across to the children or, if a passage or poem is pre-
sented verbatim, to speak it by heart without using a book.
Meanwhile, the students do nothing but listen; they do not
read the text as the teacher speaks. Then, possibly, they are
asked to reproduce what they have heard without having read it
first. This method is vital for teaching foreign languages, but
need not be taken into account so much for lessons in the
mother tongue. What matters very much with the foreign lan-
guage is that the children should understand through hearing
rather than through reading—that a language should become
intelligible to them through speech. When this has been
accomplished, the children can be allowed to take their books
and read the passage. Alternatively, if this is not expecting too
much of them, they can be given for homework the task of
reading what has been addressed in the lesson.
In foreign languages, homework should be restricted mainly
to reading. Any written work should really be done at school. As
little homework as possible should be given and not until the
later stages, after the age of twelve. Even then it should deal only
with the affairs of real life, such as writing letters, business corre-
spondence, and so on. It is real malpractice, in a higher sense, to
have school children write essays in foreign languages on subjects
that have nothing to do with life. We should be content with let-
ter writing, business correspondence, and similar topics. We can
go beyond these subjects at most by letting the children recount
Lecture Ten 137
events that have happened to them, things that they have experi-
enced. Up to the age of fourteen such narration of real happen-
ings should be cultivated far more than free composition. Free
composition really has no place in school before the ages of four-
teen or fifteen. What does belong in school up to that point is
the narrative retelling of what the children have experienced and
heard; they must learn to take these experiences in, for otherwise
they cannot participate in an appropriately social way in the cul-
tural process of humanity. Indeed, educated people today gener-
ally notice only half the world and not the whole of it.
People do many experiments today, particularly in the field of
criminal psychology. Everything has to be proved by experiment
these days. Let me give you an example. A lecture is announced
(these are academic experiments carried out at universities). For
the purpose of the experiment the lecturer plans the sequence of
events beforehand with one of the students. The professor
mounts the platform and speaks the first words of the lecture.
(All this is written down in great detail.) At that moment the stu-
dent who is part of the plot leaps onto the platform and tears
down the coat the professor has hung on a hook there. He does
exactly what they have prearranged. The professor behaves
accordingly and makes a rush at the student to prevent him from
taking down the coat. All the actions are predetermined. They
wrestle, making the movements they have contrived beforehand.
They have studied it in detail and learned it by heart so that they
do everything exactly as arranged. Then the audience members,
who are not in the know, will behave in some way. This cannot
be predetermined. But perhaps the plot could include someone
whose task it is to carefully observe the behavior of the audience.
Finally, at the end of the experiment, the members of the audi-
ence are asked to write down what they have seen.
Such experiments have been conducted at universities,
including the very experiment I have just described. The result
was that, from an audience of about thirty people, at most four

or five related the scene correctly. This can be verified because
every action was prearranged, and the scene was enacted
accordingly. Barely one-tenth of the audience recorded the
scene accurately. Most people write down the most absurd
things when taken by surprise in this way. Since we are so fond
of experimenting today, we conduct this kind of investigation
and then scientifically reach the significant conclusion that wit-
nesses in court are unreliable. If only one-tenth of an educated
audience in a university lecture hall (they are all educated peo-
ple, are they not?) report a sequence of events correctly, while
the others report incorrectly and some even put down utter
nonsense, how can witnesses in court be expected to give accu-
rate accounts about events they saw weeks or perhaps months
earlier? People with sound common sense certainly know this
to be true, because, in the course of ordinary life, people nearly
always incorrectly relate what they have seen or heard. All you
can do is develop a fine nose for detecting whether something
is being told to you accurately or not. Of all the things people
tell you from every side, hardly one-tenth is, strictly speaking,
true, hardly one-tenth is a correct account of an actual event.
As a matter of fact, people do things by halves. They develop
the half that they could more easily do without if they were to
rely properly on sound common sense; it is the other half that
is more important. We ought to see to it that our cultural life
develops in a way that will mean that witnesses are more reli-
able and people tell more of the truth. But to achieve this end,
we should start to work on it in childhood. That is the reason
why it is essential to let children recount what they have seen
and experienced rather than expect them to write free composi-
tions. In this way we will inculcate in them the habit of telling
in life, and perhaps also in court, not something that they have
invented but whatever is the truth regarding the external facts
Lecture Ten 139
discerned by their senses. The will realm ought to be taken

more into account in this effort than the intellectual realm.
The purpose of that experiment of the prearranged scene
enacted in a lecture hall and the statements made by the audi-
ence was to find out how many lies people tell. In an intellec-
tual age like ours, this is understandable. But we must bring
our intellectual age back to the realm of the will. We must pay
attention to educational details, such as letting the children
(once they can write and particularly after their twelfth year)
recount events that have actually happened rather than culti-
vating free composition, which has no place in education
before the age of fourteen or fifteen.
In foreign language lessons it is essential to bring our students
gradually to the point at which they are able to retell briefly
something they have seen or heard. It is also important to culti-
vate the element of reflex action in connection with language,
that is, to give the children orders—do this, do that—and make
sure they carry them out. In this exercise what the teacher says is
not followed by reflection on what has been said or by a slowly
spoken answer, but by action. In this way the will realm, the ele-
ment of movement, is cultivated in language lessons.
These are ideas that you must ponder well and absorb—and
take into account particularly in foreign language lessons. Our
task is always to unite the will realm with the intellect in the
right way. It is also important to cultivate object lessons in our
school, but without allowing them to become banal. The chil-
dren should never have the feeling that what they are being told
in an object lesson is really rather obvious. “Here is a piece of
chalk. What color is it?”—“Yellow.” “What is it like at the
top?”—“It is broken off.” Many an object lesson is given along
these lines. It is atrocious. Something that is obvious in ordinary
life should not be used as an object lesson. Such lessons should
be lifted up to a higher level. When they are being given an
object lesson, the children should be transported by it to a

higher sphere of their soul life. You can achieve this aim particu-
larly well if you combine object lessons with geometry.
Geometry offers an extremely good example of how to link
the object lesson to the subject itself. You start, for instance, by
drawing a right-angled isosceles triangle for the children. Below
it you attach a square to the triangle. Now we have a right-
angled isosceles triangle with a square attached to it (diagram I).
If you have not already done so, you teach the children that
with an isosceles triangle, the sides a and b are the two that
contain the right angle and that side c is the hypotenuse. On
the hypotenuse you have constructed a square.
This explanation refers only to an isosceles triangle. Then
you divide the square with diagonal lines, coloring one part
red (top and bottom) and one part yellow (right). Now you
say to the children: “I am going to cut out the yellow part and
place it beside my drawing” (diagram II). Then you take the
red part and attach it to the yellow part. Now you have made a
blue red yellow

Lecture Ten 141
square to fit one of the two equal sides, but it is constructed of

a red piece and a yellow piece. Thus the second drawing (dia-
gram II) is the same size as the yellow and red portions in the
first drawing and amounts to half of the square on the hypote-
nuse. Then you do the same for the other of the two equal
sides, using blue and adding the blue piece at the bottom so
that once more you have a right-angled isosceles triangle.
Again you cut it out (diagram III), so that now you have a
square on the other of the two equal sides.
Schopenhauer used to be furious in his day because the theo-
rem of Pythagoras was not taught in this way. In his book The
World as Will and Idea, he expressed this feeling in his rather
coarse manner: “How stupid schools are not to teach the
Pythagorean theorem by simply placing one part on top of
another so that the children can see a concrete demonstration of
it.” This applies to isosceles triangles, but exactly the same can
be done with scalene right-angled triangles by fitting one part
over another in the manner demonstrated. That is an object les-
son; you can turn geometry into an object lesson. When you
aim to teach the children the Pythagorean theorem after the age
of ten, it is vital that you plan ahead how you will demonstrate
it for them by fitting together the parts of the square on the
hypotenuse. (I have often tested this myself.) If you as the
teacher have in mind that you are aiming to teach this in a par-
ticular geometry lesson, in at most seven or eight preceding les-
sons you can teach all the geometry that is necessary to lead up
to the Pythagorean theorem, the well-known “asses’ bridge.”
It is very economical indeed to teach the beginnings of geom-
etry in this graphic manner. You will save much time, and you
will also rescue the children from a significant pitfall (something
that is destructive to teaching). You spare them from carrying
out abstract thinking in the effort to understand the Pythago-
rean theorem; you let them form concrete thoughts and proceed
from the simple to the complex. You should start by formulating

the Pythagorean theorem as shown here for the isosceles triangle,
and then you progress to the scalene triangle. Even when this les-
son is taught today in the manner of an object lesson (for it does
happen sometimes), it is not broad enough to cover the whole of
the Pythagorean theorem. People do not begin with the simple
isosceles triangle (which is a good preparation) and progress to
the scalene right-angled triangle. But this is the very point that is
important—to include it very consciously in the goal of geome-
try lessons. What you must consider is the use of different colors.
The various areas are treated with colors that are laid one on top
of the other. Most of you will have done something similar
already, though not quite in this way.
1. Up to the ninth year:

music, painting, drawing
writing, reading
foreign languages
arithmetic (somewhat later)
2. Up to the twelfth year:
geography (continually from this point on)
grammar and word inflections
natural history of animal kingdom
and plant kingdom
foreign languages
geometry
concepts of physics
3. Up to the fourteenth year:
geography (continues)
syntax
minerals
physics and chemistry
foreign languages, history
Lecture Eleven
SEPTEMBER 2, 1919
I have told you that geography is first introduced during the

second of the three stages between the ages of seven and four-
teen. We can very well begin with it when the children have
reached the age of nine, but it must be approached in the right
way. Geography must encompass much more in the future
than it does now for children up to fourteen, fifteen, and older.
It is pushed too much into the background these days, treated
like the stepchild of education. In geography the achievements
of all the other lessons should meet and flow together in all
sorts of ways. And though I have said that mineralogy is not
taken up until the third stage, when the children are about
twelve, it can be woven into geography in a narrative way, com-
bined with direct observation, during the previous stage.
It is particularly important in geography that we start with
what the children already know about the face of the earth and
about what takes place on the face of the earth. We endeavor to
give the children, in an artistic way, a kind of picture of the
hills and rivers and other features of their immediate surround-
ings. We develop with the children an elementary map of the
immediate neighborhood where they are growing up and
which they therefore know. Between the ages of nine and
twelve, children can take in an enormous amount from geogra-
phy if we go about teaching it the right way. We try to teach
them what it means when you change your point of view from
being within a neighborhood to seeing it from outside, from

the air; we take them through the process of transforming a
landscape into a map, at first with the landscape they know. We
try to teach them that rivers flow through the district by actu-
ally drawing the system of rivers and streams on the map of the
neighborhood. We also draw in the hills. It is good to work
with colors, making the rivers blue and the hills or mountains
brown. Then we add the other things linked to the way people
live. We put in all the configurations of the district, drawing
the children’s attention to them as we go: Here is a part where
fruit trees are planted, so we draw in the fruit trees.
Then we point out that there are also some parts covered
with coniferous trees, so we draw them in, too.
We show them that another part of the neighborhood is cov-

ered with cornfields, and then we include them on our map.
There are also meadows to be added. We point out to the chil-

dren the meadows that can be mown, shown in this drawing.
Lecture Eleven 145
Meadows that cannot be mown but that provide grass for the
cattle, though it is shorter and sparser, are also included in our
map. We tell the children that this is pasture land.
And so we bring the map to life for the children.

From this map the children gain some sort of overall view of
the economic foundations of the neighborhood. We also start
pointing out that there are many things like coal and ore inside
the hills. We show them the way in which the rivers are used to
transport things from one place to another place. We unfold for
them much of what is connected with this economic structure
of the district. Having made clear the economic foundation
provided by the rivers and hills, fields and woods, and so on,
insofar as these things can be explained to the children, we next
put in the villages or towns of the district we are dealing with.
And now we begin to point out why it is that a village appears at
a particular place and the way this is connected with the courses
of the streams and rivers, with the hills and what they might
have to offer in their depths. In short, by using the map we
endeavor to awaken in the children some idea of the economic
links that exist between the natural formation of the land and
the conditions of human life. This leads into giving them a pic-
ture of the difference between country life and town life. We
take all this as far as the children are able to grasp it. And finally
we show how human beings with their industry meet the condi-
tions nature offers them. That is, we begin to show the children
that human beings make artificial rivers known as canals, that
they build railways. Then we point out how provisions can be
transported with the help of the railways and how people’s very
situation in life is affected.
After working for a while toward an understanding of the

economic relationships between natural conditions and the
conditions of human life, we can build on the concepts the
children have gained and lead them further into the world at
large. If we have taken the first steps in the right way, it will not
be necessary to be excessively pedantic in this. The pedant
would say at this point that the natural way is to begin with the
geography of the immediate neighborhood and then spread out
concentrically from there. Even this is too pedantic. There is
no need to enlarge in this way. When a firm foundation has
been laid in understanding the links between nature and
humans, we can quite well turn our attention to something
else. In the way we turn to something else, however, we should
continue as effectively and intensively as possible to develop
the theme of the economic links between human beings and
their natural environment.
Here in our district, for instance, after developing the neces-
sary concepts from familiar stretches of land and helping the
children find their bearings in their own neighborhood, we can
widen their horizon by telling them about the geography of the
Alps. We can extend the mapmaking already taught by drawing
a line showing where the southern Alps meet the Mediterra-
nean Sea. You also draw the northern part of Italy, the Adriatic
Sea, and so on, saying there are great rivers there and drawing
in the courses of the rivers. You draw the Rhône, the Rhine, the
Inn, and the Danube with their tributaries and then add the
different arms of the Alps. The children will be extraordinarily
fascinated when they discover how the rivers separate the dif-
ferent arms.
Then, along the blue lines of the rivers, you can draw red
lines, imaginary boundaries, for instance, along the Rhône
from Lake Geneva back to its source, then along the Rhine,
over the top of the Brenner, and so on, dividing the Alps from
Lecture Eleven 147
west to east. You can then say, “Look, down below I have
drawn a red line along the rivers, and at the top I have also
drawn a red line. The Alps lying between these red lines are dif-
ferent from those lying above and below them.” Now you
could bring mineralogy into geography by showing the chil-
dren a piece of Jura limestone and saying, “The mountain
ranges above the top red line and those under the lower red line
are made of limestone like this.” For what lies between you
show them a piece of granite—gneiss—and say, “The moun-
tains between the red lines are of rock like this, the oldest
rock.” The children will be tremendously interested in this
Alpine massif. You might perhaps also show them a relief map
of the area. This gives a more plastic impression of how the
river courses divide the Alps into limestone Alps, gneiss, mica,
slate, and so on, and of how the whole length of the range is
somewhat curved and shows from south to north the differen-
tiation into limestone—granite—limestone, divided by the riv-
ers. Without any pedantic object lessons, you can bring much
to this description that will greatly extend the children’s range
of ideas.
Then you go on to describe to the children (you have already
prepared for this in your nature lessons) what grows down in
the valley, what grows higher up the mountainside, what grows
even higher up, and also what does not grow at the summit.
You paint a vertical picture of the vegetation. Next you begin to
show the children the ways in which human beings establish
themselves in a countryside dominated by massive mountains.
Help them picture to themselves a really high mountain village
and what people must do to live there. Mark it on your map.
Then you describe a village and the roads of a valley and a town
at the confluence of a river and one of its tributaries. You char-
acterize in this wider context the relationship between the nat-
ural configuration of the land and the way humans establish
their economic life. Out of the natural surroundings you build

up a picture of human industry, drawing the children’s atten-
tion to the places where ore and coal can be found and to how
settlements are determined by such things.
Next, draw for the children a picture of a landscape with no
mountains, a flat plain, and treat it in a similar way. Describe
the natural configuration, the structure of the ground, and
show them that some plants grow on poor soil and others on
rich soil. Point out the makeup of the soil in which potatoes
grow (you can do this with quite simple means), or wheat, or
rye, and so on. You will already have taught them the differ-
ences between wheat, rye, and oats. Do not hesitate to teach
them things that as yet they can understand only in a general
way and will grasp more clearly in later lessons, when they
return to them from another point of view. Until they are
twelve, introduce them chiefly to economic conditions and
relationships and make these clear. Concentrate more on
describing the geography of their own country than on giving
them a complete picture of the Earth. Let them, however, gain
an impression of how vast the ocean is. You started drawing it
when you showed where the southern Alps meet the Mediterra-
nean. Draw the sea as a blue surface, and draw the outlines of
Spain and France, showing that there is an immense ocean to
the west. In a way that they can understand, introduce gradu-
ally the idea that America also exists. They should have a men-
tal picture of this before they are twelve.
If you start with this good foundation, you can count on the
children having sufficient understanding when they are about
twelve for you to proceed more systematically. You will take less
time to give them a picture of the Earth as a whole by teaching
them about the five continents and the oceans (more briefly
than has been your method up to now) and describing the eco-
nomic life of the different continents. You should be able to
Lecture Eleven 149
formulate everything on the foundations you have laid. When

you have drawn together in a picture of the whole Earth all the
knowledge you have given the children about the economic life
of humans and when you have also taught them history in the
manner described for about six months, you can transfer your
attention to the cultural environment made by the people who
inhabit the different continents. But do not go into this differ-
ent sphere until you have made the children’s souls somewhat
pliant through their first history lessons.
You can also speak of the geographical distribution of the
characteristics of the different peoples. Do not speak any earlier
about the distinctive differences of the various peoples, for only
based on the foundation I have described will the children
bring their best understanding to this subject. You can speak of
the differences between Asiatic, European, and American peo-
ples and of the differences between Mediterranean and north-
ern European peoples. Thus you gradually combine geography
with history. You will be fulfilling a beautiful task that brings
much joy to the children if you do what I have just described
mainly between the ages of twelve and fifteen.
You see that a great deal must be incorporated into teaching
geography, so that it can become a kind of summary of every-
thing else we do with the children. And so much can flow
together in geography. Toward the end, a wonderful interplay
between geography and history will be possible. Because you
embrace many subjects in your geography lessons, you will
then be able to draw on them for many lessons. This will, of
course, tax your imaginative abilities and your inventiveness.
When you tell the children that here or there certain things are
done, for instance, that the Japanese make their pictures in a
particular way, you can then encourage them to do the same,
albeit in their much more simple and primitive way. When you
are telling the children about the links between agriculture and
the way humans live, do not miss the opportunity to give them
a clear picture of a plough and a harrow in connection with the
geographical picture.
Also have the children imitate some of the things you tell
them, perhaps in the form of a little plaything or a piece of
artistic work. This will give them skills and will prepare them
for taking their places properly in life later on. You could even
make little ploughs and have them cultivate the school garden
or let them cut with small sickles or mow with small scythes;
this will establish a good contact with life. For more important
than dexterity is the soul contact made between the life of the
child and the life of the world. It is a fact that a child who has
cut grass with a sickle or mown it with a scythe, a child who
has made a furrow with a little plough, will turn into a different
person from one who has not done these things. Quite simply,
the soul element is changed. Abstract lessons in manual skills
are not really a substitute. Paper folding and laying little sticks
should be actively avoided, for these things tend to make chil-
dren unfit for life rather than fit them for it. It is far better to
encourage them to do things that really happen in life than to
invent things for them to do that do not occur in life.
By building up our geography lessons in the way I have
described, we acquaint the children in the most natural way
with the fact that human life is brought together from many
sides in various ways. At the same time we take care to deal
with things that the children are well able to understand. Thus,
between ages nine and twelve, we describe economic condi-
tions and external affairs in our geography lessons. From this
point, we lead on to an understanding of cultural and spiritual
matters pertaining to different peoples. Then, while saving the
details for later, we merely hint at what goes on in the rights
sphere of the different nations, letting only the very first, most
primitive concepts peep through the economic and cultural
Lecture Eleven 151
life. The children do not as yet have a full understanding for

matters of the rights sphere, and if they are confronted with
these concepts too early in their development, their soul forces
will be ruined for the rest of their lives because such concepts
will be so abstract.
It is indeed a good idea if you can use the geography lessons
to bring unity to all the other subjects. Perhaps the worst thing
that can happen to geography is for it to be regimented into a
strictly demarcated timetable, which is something we do not
want. We arrange the lessons so that each subject can be treated
for a longer span of time. When we take children into the
school we work first of all toward teaching them to write. That
is, we occupy the morning hours with painting, drawing, and
learning to write. Our timetable will not stipulate that the first
lesson be writing, the second reading, and so on; we will
occupy ourselves with similar subjects for longer stretches at a
time. Not until the children can write a little will we move on
to reading. Of course, in learning to write they also learn to
read a little, but these two studies can be combined in an even
better way. We assign definite periods for the other lessons too,
not following one subject with another, lesson by lesson, but
staying with one subject for quite some time and coming back
to other topics only after several weeks. We concentrate our les-
sons. In this way, we are in a position to teach much more eco-
nomically than would be the case if we had to waste our time
and energy on adhering to some dreadful timetable, teaching a
subject in one lesson and then wiping it out in the next by
teaching something quite different. You can see particularly
with geography how you can approach it from all sorts of direc-
tions. It is not laid down for you that you have to teach geogra-
phy from ages nine to ten; instead, you are left free to decide
when the time is ripe to fit geography in with whatever else you
have been doing.
This method imposes a great deal of responsibility on you,

but without such responsibility no teaching can be carried out.
A curriculum that from the start lays down a schedule and all
sorts of other dictums completely eliminates the art of teach-
ing. This must not be. The teacher must be the driving and
stimulating force in the whole educational system. What I have
just shown you about the way to teach geography is an excel-
lent example that gives you a proper picture of how everything
should be done. Geography really can become a great channel
into which everything flows and from which a great deal can
also be derived. For instance, in the geography lesson you show
the children the ways in which limestone mountains differ
from granite mountains. Later you can show them a lump of
granite and point out that it contains different minerals,
including a substance that sparkles. Then you show them a
piece of mica and tell them that what they see sparkling in the
granite is mica. Next you can show them all the other sub-
stances hiding in granite. You show them a piece of quartz and
try to unfold the whole mineral world out of a lump of rock.
This is another good opportunity for adding a great deal to
the children’s understanding of the ways in which things that
belong together as a whole can be divided into their separate
parts. It is far more useful to teach the children about granite
first and then about the constituent minerals than it is to start
with quartz, mica, feldspar, and so on and then show that they
are all mixed up in granite. Mineralogy is a very good subject
for starting with the whole and moving to the parts, for begin-
ning with the way a mountain is constructed and progressing
to mineralogy. This method certainly helps the children.
With the animal kingdom you will proceed in the opposite
direction, building up from the individual animals. As we have
seen in our seminar discussions, the plant kingdom is to be
treated as a totality before we look at the particulars. And for
Lecture Eleven 153
the mineral kingdom, nature itself often supplies us with the

aggregate from which we can then proceed to the distinct con-
stituents. Again linking mineralogy with geography, we must
not omit a discussion of how all the things of economic value
we find in nature are used. Referring to what we have said
about the stony structure of the mountains, we discuss all the
substances, such as coal, that we have a use for, in industry and
elsewhere. We depict these things in a simple way, but the start-
ing point is our discussion of the mountains. Nor should we
neglect to describe a sawmill when we are dealing with the for-
est. We start with the forest, move on to a discussion of wood,
and come finally to the sawmill.
We can do a tremendous amount with our lessons if we do
not have to start with a timetable laid down with military pre-
cision but can proceed according to what naturally arises out of
them. But we must have a good idea of what is required by the
children at the different stages of their development, from the
time they start school up to the age of nine, from nine to
twelve, and from twelve to fifteen.
Lecture Twelve
SEPTEMBER 3, 1919
We must not close our minds to the fact that the relationship
human beings have with their environment is far more com-
plex than simply those aspects of which we are always con-
scious. From various points of view I have tried to clarify for
you the nature and significance of the unconscious and sub-
conscious workings of the soul. In the sphere of education and
educational methods, it is particularly important that human
beings should be brought up in a way that suits not only their
conscious being but also their subconscious and unconscious
soul forces. To be a real educator and teacher, you cannot avoid
entering into the subtleties of the human being.
We have come to know the three stages of human develop-
ment between the change of teeth and puberty. We must be
quite clear that in addition to the conscious realm, the subcon-
scious plays a large part, particularly in the last of these
stages—a part that is significant for the whole future of the
human being. By looking at this matter from another point of
view, I would like to make clear to you why this is so.
Just think how many people today travel by electric train
without having the faintest idea how an electric train is set in
motion. Imagine even how many people see a steam engine
rushing by without having any clue as to the workings of phys-
ics and mechanics that propel it. Consider what position such
ignorance puts us in with regard to our relationship with our
Lecture Twelve 155
environment, that very environment we use for our conve-

nience. We live in a world that has been brought about by
human beings, that has been formed by human thoughts, that
we use and know nothing about. The fact that we understand
nothing about something that has been formed by human
beings and is fundamentally the result of human thinking is
greatly significant for the whole mood of soul and spirit of
humankind. Human beings literally have to turn a deaf ear in
order not to perceive the resulting effects.
It is always very satisfying to notice how people from the bet-
ter classes (now, I do not want to offend anyone with my turn
of phrase) enter a factory and feel thoroughly ill at ease. This
happens because there shoots up from their subconscious the
feeling that they use the things that are manufactured in the
factory without having the slightest relationship as human
beings with what goes on there. They know nothing about it.
When you sense the discomfiture of inveterate cigarette smok-
ers (to take a familiar example) when they enter the Wal-
dorf-Astoria cigarette factory, knowing nothing about what
takes place there so that they can be kept supplied with ciga-
rettes, you can be pleased by the fact that at least they can still
dimly perceive their ignorance. They are ignorant about the
environment born out of human thoughts—the environment
in which they live and from which they obtain the goods they
use. We can be glad if people enter and leave an electric train
with a slight feeling of unease because they have no idea how it
works. This discomfiture is the first inkling of an improvement
in this realm. The very worst thing is to experience and live in a
world made by human beings without bothering ourselves
about this world.
We can work against these things only by starting during the
last stage of the lower school. We must really not let the fifteen-
and sixteen-year-olds leave school without at least elementary
ideas about the more important processes taking place in life.

We should teach them in a way that leaves them with a yearn-
ing to be curious and inquisitive at every opportunity about
what is going on around them, so that they use this curiosity
and thirst for knowledge to add to whatever they already know.
At the end of the lower school years, we should employ all the
different subjects in a comprehensive sense toward a social edu-
cation of our students, just as we use the separate subjects in
geography to build an overall geographical structure in the way
I described in my previous lecture. In other words, we must not
neglect to use the concepts learned earlier about physics and
natural history to introduce the children to the industrial pro-
cesses closest to them. At age fifteen or sixteen they should have
gained an idea of what goes on in a soap factory or a spinning
mill.
Naturally, we shall have to proceed as economically as possi-
ble. It is always possible to condense out of the overall compli-
cated processes a simple, generalized picture. I think Mr. Molt
will agree that one could teach children briefly about the whole
process of cigarette manufacturing from beginning to end in a
few simple sentences, which would then need only a little
explanation taken from the rest of the subjects we have taught
them.1 It is entirely beneficial for children between the ages of
thirteen and sixteen to be given such condensed descriptions of
different branches of industry. It would be very good if during
these years they were to keep a notebook in which to record the
processes of soap manufacture, cigarette production, spinning,
weaving, and so on. They need not be taught about mechanical
and chemical technology on a grand scale, but they would gain
1. Emil Molt (1876–1936) was head of the Waldorf cigarette factory in

Stuttgart where Rudolf Steiner was first invited to introduce his educa-
tional methods into practice.
Lecture Twelve 157
a great deal from keeping such a notebook. Even if the book

were later to be lost, a residue would remain. They would not
simply have the benefit of knowing these things, but, more
important, they would feel as they went through life and their
profession that they had once known these things, that they
had once been through the process of learning about them.
This affects the assurance with which people act; it affects the
self-possession with which they take their place in the world. It
is very important for the willpower and the capacity for making
decisions.
No profession is without people of efficiency and initiative
who occupy their place in the world with the feeling that they
once knew about things they do not actually need for their own
profession, even if only in a primitive way. Even if they have
forgotten these subjects, echoes will linger. We learn a lot in
school, often in object lessons, that so often degenerates into
platitudes. But in these cases it is found that later in life no feel-
ing remains that leads a person to say, “I once learned about
that, and how fortunate I was to have done so.” Instead, the
feeling is “Thank God I have forgotten all that; what a good
thing that I have forgotten what I learned then.” We ought
never to be responsible for arousing this feeling in a person. If
we have been taught in our childhood in a manner that took
account of what I have just said, when we later enter a factory
or similar place, innumerable resonances will shoot up out of
our subconscious. Today everything in life is specialized. This
specialization is truly dreadful. And the main reason why so
much in life is specialized is because we start to specialize in the
way we teach in schools.
The gist of these remarks might well be summarized in these
words: Every single thing children learn during the course of
their schooling should in the end be presented so broadly that
threads may everywhere be found linking it with practical
human life. Very, very many things that are now antisocial in
the world would be made social if we could at least touch upon
an insight into matters that later need not have any direct bear-
ing on our own work in life.
For instance, we ought to take careful note of what is consid-
ered important in school subjects that are still rooted in older,
good, though perhaps old-fashioned insights in teaching. In
this connection I want to point to a remarkable phenomenon.
When those of us who are now old started on our secondary
school courses in Austria at the age of fourteen or fifteen, we
had relatively good geometry and arithmetic textbooks. They
have now disappeared. A few years ago in Vienna I hunted
through all kinds of secondhand bookshops for older geometry
textbooks, because I wanted once again to have before my eyes
what gave us such delight, for example, in Wiener-Neustadt.2
On the day we entered the first class of the senior school, the
boys from the second class met us in the corridor shouting:
“Fialkowskiy, Fialkowskiy, you'll have to pay up tomorrow!”
We students in the first class took over Fialkowskiy's geometry
textbook from the students of the second class and brought
them the money the next day. I actually found one of these
Fialkowskiy geometry books during my hunt. It gave me a
great deal of pleasure because it shows that much better geome-
try books for schools were written in the old tradition than has
been the case lately.
The present-day books that have replaced the older ones are
quite atrocious. The situation in the field of arithmetic and
geometry is particularly bad. But if we think back only to the
generations just before us, they certainly had better textbooks,
which nearly all came from the school of the Austrian Benedic-
tines. It was the Benedictine monks who wrote the mathematical
2. Rudolf Steiner’s home town.

Lecture Twelve 159
and geometrical books; they were very good because the Bene-
dictine Order is the Catholic order that takes great care that its
members should be schooled very well in geometry and mathe-
matics. The general conviction within the order is that it is
ludicrous for someone to mount the pulpit and speak to the
people if he does not know any geometry or mathematics.
This ideal of unity that fills the human soul must pulse
through all teaching. Something of the world as a totality must
live in every profession. In particular, there must be an element
of whatever is opposite to the profession, something one thinks
will be of hardly any use in that profession. A person must
occupy oneself with what is, in a way, the opposite of one's
own profession. But one will long for this only if one is taught
in the way I have described.
It was just at the time when materialism spread far and wide,
in the last third of the nineteenth century, that this materialism
also permeated education to such a degree that specialization
came to be considered very important. Please do not subscribe
to the belief that you will make children idealistic if, during the
last years of the lower school and the first of the senior school,
you avoid showing them how what you teach them is linked
with practical life. Do not imagine that they will be more ideal-
istic in later life if you have them write essays on all sorts of sen-
timental feelings about the world, on the gentleness of the
lamb, the fierceness of the lion, and so on, and on God-perme-
ated nature. You do not have an idealistic effect on the children
in this way. You will do far better, in fact, to cultivate idealism
if you do not approach it so directly, so crudely.
Why have people in recent times become so irreligious? For
the simple reason that what is now preached is far too senti-
mental and abstract. People are irreligious now because the
church pays so little heed to divine commandments. For
instance, there is the commandment “You shall not take the
name of the Lord your God in vain.” If you heed this injunc-
tion and refrain from mentioning the name Jesus Christ after
every fifth sentence or talking about God's universal order, you
are immediately criticized by those so-called church-minded
people who would prefer to hear you mention Jesus Christ and
God in every sentence. These church-minded circles are the
very ones who regard as an irreligious attitude the meek and
quiet spirit that seeks to be inwardly penetrated by the divine
and avoids uttering, “Lord, Lord,” at every moment. If what is
presented to human beings by teachers is permeated by this
quiet, inwardly working godliness that is not carried sentimen-
tally on the tip of the tongue, the cry, resulting from wrong
upbringing, is heard on every side: “Ah, yes, he ought to speak
far more about Christianity and such things.” We must take
care in education not to drag everything learned by the chil-
dren into sentimentality, especially in their thirteenth through
fifteenth years, but rather lead what we teach them more
toward the workings of practical life. No child ought to reach
age fifteen without having been guided in arithmetic lessons to
an understanding of the rules of at least the simplest forms of
bookkeeping.
Similarly, the principles of grammar should lead not so
much to the kind of essay depicting the human being's inner
life as though bathed in a soup of sentimentality but rather to
business compositions, business letters. The former kind of
essay, a glorified version of the spirit that reigns when people
gather over their wine in the evening or at coffee parties, is the
kind of essay usually expected of thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds.
No child should pass beyond the age of fifteen without having
gone through the stage of writing specimens of practical busi-
ness letters. Do not say that the children can learn to do so
later. Yes, by overcoming dreadful obstacles they can learn it
later, but only if they can overcome these obstacles. It is of great
Lecture Twelve 161
benefit to the children if you teach them to let their knowledge

of grammar and language flow into business letters. There
should be nobody today who has not at one time learned to
write a decent business letter. A person may not need to apply
this knowledge in later life at all, but there really should be
nobody who has not been encouraged at one time to write a
decent business letter. If you satiate the children mainly with
sentimental idealism between the ages of thirteen and fifteen,
they will later develop an aversion to idealism and become
materialistic people. If you lead them during these years into
the practical concerns of life, they will retain a healthy relation-
ship to the idealistic needs of the soul, since these can be wiped
out only if they are senselessly indulged during early youth.
This is extraordinarily important; in this connection even a
few points about the structure of the lessons are of great signif-
icance. You know that with regard to the way we teach religion
we shall have to make compromises. As a result, a force that
one day will fill the soul element of our teaching with a reli-
gious quality cannot at present flow into the rest of our teach-
ing. The fact that we have to compromise in this way stems
from the way in which religious bodies have adopted an atti-
tude to the world that is inimical to culture. But even today, if
only the religious bodies, for their part, would also make com-
promises with us, a good deal could flow from this religious
instruction squeezed in among the rest of the lessons.
It would be beneficial if, for instance, teachers of religion
would condescend from time to time to include material from
another subject in their lessons. If, for instance, in the midst of
their religion lessons they were able to link what they were say-
ing to an explanation of the steam engine or an astronomical
fact, or something quite worldly, the simple fact that it is the
religion teacher who makes this connection would be immeasur-
ably significant for the consciousness of the growing children.
I am quoting you this extreme example because in the rest of

our lessons we shall have to adopt this method, even though it
can be employed only in a limited way in the teaching of reli-
gion. We must not allow ourselves to think pedantically: “Now
I am teaching geography, and now I am teaching history. I need
not bother about anything else.” When we explain to the chil-
dren that the word sofa came from the Orient during the Cru-
sades, we shall see to it that we then include in the history
lesson a description of the way sofas are manufactured. This
will lead us on to other items of furniture that are more occi-
dental. In other words, we shall extract something quite novel
from the so-called “subject” of our lesson.
This method of teaching is immensely profitable for the
growing children because moving from one subject to another
in a way that connects one thing with another is more benefi-
cial than anything else for the development of spirit and soul,
and even of the body. If a teacher suddenly tells children, to
their delight, about the manufacture of sofas in the middle of a
history lesson, leading perhaps to a discussion of Oriental car-
pet patterns and presented in a way that gives them a real view
of the subject, such children will have better digestion than
children who are taught French lessons followed by geometry.
The child will actually be physically more healthy. Thus we
can well structure our lessons in this inwardly healthy way.
Today most people suffer from all sorts of digestive distur-
bances, abdominal disturbances that are the consequence, to a
great extent, of our unnatural teaching. We cannot adapt our
teaching to the demands of life. The worst schools in this
respect are the upper-class young ladies' colleges. If someone
were to make a study of the connection between the teaching
in these upper-class young ladies' colleges and the incidence of
gynecological illness, it would provide a most interesting chap-
ter in cultural history. We simply must draw attention to such
Lecture Twelve 163
matters so that through avoiding much of what has come to

the fore quite recently, healing may enter into this field. Above
all, one must know that humans are complicated beings and
that what one wants to cultivate in them often requires initial
preparation.
If you want to gather interested children around you (chil-
dren who are not specially selected but come from widely vary-
ing backgrounds) in order, in your religious fervor, to tell them
about the glories of the divine powers in the world, what you
say will go in one ear and out the other. It will never reach their
feelings. Having written a business letter with a group of chil-
dren in the morning, you might have the same group again in
the afternoon, carrying in their subconscious what has been
activated by the business letter in the morning. You are fortu-
nate if it is now a matter of teaching them religious concepts,
for you yourself will have roused in them the mood that is now
calling for its opposite. Truly, these views are not being put
before you as matters of some abstract point of method but
because they are of immense importance for life. I should like
to know who has not encountered, on going out into life, the
enormous amount of unnecessary work that is done.
Businesspeople will always agree when you outline the fol-
lowing scenario. Take, for example, an employee in some firm;
he is told to write a business letter to a related branch or to
somebody who is to undertake selling for the firm. He writes
this letter and receives an answer; then he has to write another
letter and receives a second answer and so on. This wasting of
time has gained much ground in business life today. We cer-
tainly proceed in an immensely uneconomical way in our pub-
lic affairs. You can sense this. Anyone endowed with ordinary
common sense suffers real tortures when glancing at the copy
file in any office. This is not the result of an aversion to the
forms of address or to the interests depicted there but because
everything is expressed in the most impractical manner possible

and because this file could be reduced to a quarter of its size.
The sole reason for this excess is that the schooling of the four-
teen- and fifteen-year-olds is not arranged in a suitable way.
This mismanagement can simply not be made up for later in
life. When it is, it is done only by conquering almost insupera-
ble difficulties. The opportunities missed during this period
cannot even be made up for at college, because the forces that
develop at this time in life peter out and are no longer present
in the same form later. You count on these forces when you
depend on someone to formulate a letter not just superficially,
with only half a mind on the matter, but to give it full attention
and express it carefully and clearly.
During the first stage of the children's development, from
the time they come to school up to the age of nine, it matters
most that we should be thoroughly immersed in the nature of
the human being so that we teach entirely out of it. In contrast,
it is most important in planning the curriculum for thirteen- to
fifteen-year-olds that we teachers be immersed in life, that we
be interested in life and sympathetic toward it, and that we
teach out of the reality of life. I had to say all this to you before
going on to put together the ideal curriculum for you, after
which we shall compare this ideal curriculum with the ones
that will play a part in your teaching, for we are surrounded
everywhere with the external world and its organization.
Lecture Thirteen
SEPTEMBER 4, 1919
You have seen in these lectures concerned with teaching

methods that we have gradually approached the insights that are
to give us the actual curriculum. I have told you a number of
times that with regard to what already exists we will have to
reach a compromise as to the influences we take into our school
and how we incorporate them. For we cannot as yet create in
addition to the Waldorf school the rest of the social environ-
ment by which it ought to be surrounded. And so, from our
existing social environment, influences will stream toward us
that will again and again frustrate any ideal Waldorf curriculum
we might work out. But we will be good teachers in the Waldorf
school only if we know how the ideal curriculum relates to our
curriculum, as it will have to be formed in the beginning
because of the influence of our external social environment.
We must first be aware of the significant difficulties that will
arise for children right at the beginning of their training.
There will be other difficulties in the thirteen- to fif-
teen-year-old age group. The problems we shall encounter
with regard to the youngest children will arise because the out-
side world already has an established curriculum. Such a cur-
riculum stipulates all sorts of educational goals, and we will
not be able to risk letting our children reach the end of their
first and second years at school without knowing what chil-
dren being brought up and educated elsewhere know. By the
time they have reached the age of nine, the children educated
by our method will have surpassed the others. But in the
interim period it could happen that they would have to show
to some external commission of inquiry what they have
learned by the end of their first year at school. The subjects
that an external commission of inquiry would expect them to
know are the very ones that it is not good for them to know.
Our ideal curriculum would have aims different from the
requirements of a commission of inquiry. Stipulations from
the outside world will partly destroy our ideal curriculum.
This is the position at the lower end of the Waldorf school. In
the higher grades we will be dealing with children coming to
us from outside schools who will not have been taught by the
methods that should have governed their education.
The chief mistake attendant today on the education of chil-
dren between the ages of seven and fourteen is that they are
taught far too intellectually. However much people may hold
forth against intellectualism, the fact remains that the aims of
teaching are far too intellectual. Children will be coming to us
who have a strong tendency to be like old men and women,
who have much more of old age in them than children of thir-
teen or fourteen should have. This explains why, in youth orga-
nizations such as the Pathfinders, when young people today
call for reforms and stipulate how they want to be brought up
and educated, they reveal such appalling abstractions, that is,
such senile attitudes.1 When our young people demand to be
taught in a youthful way, as do the members of a youth move-
ment, they are stipulating the principles of old age. We really
do encounter this attitude.
I myself came across a very good example during one of the
sessions of a workers' council for cultural affairs when the young
1. The Pathfinders are a variation of Sir Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts.

Lecture Thirteen 167
member of a youth movement of some sort came forward.2 He

began to read out his absolutely tedious abstractions about the
way in which youth demanded to be educated. For some listen-
ers this was just too boring. Everything he said was so obvious,
and this very fact of being so obvious has something senile
about it. The audience members grew restless, and the young
speaker hurled into their midst: “I declare that the older genera-
tions do not understand youth.” But the fact was that this
youngster, who was still half a child, was too senile precisely
because of a thwarted education and thwarted teaching.
We must seriously consider this when children between
twelve and fourteen years of age come to our school and, for the
time being, we are expected to give them the finishing touches,
so to speak. Great problems arise for us at the beginning and
end of the school years. We must try to do justice, as much as
possible, to the ideal curriculum, and we must do our utmost
not to estrange the children too much from modern life.
In the very first school year the curriculum contains a rather
disastrous element. It is expected that children should achieve
the aim of reading as much as possible, while little is required in
the way of writing. Writing need only be started, but reading
must be brought to the stage during the first year where the
children can read pieces both in Gothic and Latin script that
have been read with or to them.3 They must be able to do this
in both Gothic and Latin script, while relatively little is required
in the way of writing. If we could educate in an ideal way, we
would start with the forms of letters in the manner discussed,
and then we would let the children gradually change the forms,
2. After World War I, workers’ councils of all kinds were established

throughout Germany.
3. Many of the Gothic characters differ radically from their Latin counter-
parts; both scripts were used for writing German during Steiner’s time.
which we have ourselves developed, into the forms of handwrit-

ten characters. We will do this; we will not allow ourselves to be
prevented from starting with drawing and painting and then
evolving the written letters from drawing and painting. Only
afterward will we proceed to the printed letters.
When the children have learned to recognize the handwritten
letters, we will make the transition to printed letters. We will
allow one mistake, however, because there will not be enough
time in the first year to mold both the Gothic and the Latin
scripts in this way and then go on to reading both scripts. This
would overburden the first year of school too much. For this
reason, we will follow the path from painting and drawing to
writing the Gothic script and then make the transition from
Gothic written to Gothic printed letters with simple reading.
Then, without first deriving the Latin letters from drawing, we
will move directly from printed German to printed Latin letters.
We will work this out as a compromise. In order to do justice to
true education we will develop writing from drawing, but on
the other hand, so that the children can keep up with the
requirements of the curriculum, we will also start them on ele-
mentary reading of texts in Latin print. This will be our task
with respect to writing and reading. In these lectures on method
I have already pointed out that once we have developed the
forms of the letters to a certain degree, we will have to proceed
more rapidly.
Above all, we must try to cultivate as much simple speaking
and conversation with the children as possible during the first
year. We read aloud as little as possible, but instead prepare
ourselves so well that we can bring to them in a narrative way
whatever we want to tell them. Then we seek to reach the point
where the children are able to retell what they have heard from
us. We avoid using passages that do not stimulate the imagina-
tion and make as much use as possible of texts that activate the
imagination strongly, namely, fairy tales—as many fairy tales as

possible. Having practiced this telling and retelling with the
children for a long time, we start in a small way to let them give
brief accounts of experiences they themselves have had. We let
the children relate something they like talking about. With all
this telling and retelling of stories and personal experiences, we
develop the transition from the local vernacular to educated
speech by simply correcting mistakes the children make, with-
out being pedantic about it.4 At first they will make many mis-
takes, but later fewer and fewer. Through telling and retelling,
we develop in the children the transition from vernacular to
educated speech. In this way, the children will have reached the
desired goal by the end of their first year at school.
Nevertheless, we will have to introduce a topic that really
ought not to be included in this very first year of schooling
because it weighs on the child's soul. We have to teach the chil-
dren the difference between a vowel and a consonant. If we could
follow the ideal curriculum, we would not do this during the
first year. But then an inspector might come at the end of the
first year and ask the children to define an i and an l, and they
would not know that one is a vowel and the other a consonant.
And it would be said that this ignorance was the result of anthro-
posophy. We must make sure that the children can distinguish
between a vowel and a consonant. We must also teach them the
difference between a noun and an article. Here we find ourselves
in a real dilemma, because, according to the present curriculum,
we are expected to use the German and not the Latin expressions
for grammatical terms, and so we ought to say “gender word”
instead of “article.” In this case, I think it would be better not to
be pedantic and simply to continue to say “article.”
4. This is necessary in German-speaking countries because the dialects bear

little relation to the written language.
I have already given you hints on how to help the children

distinguish between nouns and adjectives. You help them see
how a noun refers to something that stands outside in space by
itself. You say to them: “Let us take the word tree. A tree is
something that remains standing in space. But look at a tree in
winter and again in spring and again in summer. The tree is
always there, but it looks different in winter than it does in
summer and different again in spring. In winter we say it is
brown. In spring we say it is green. In summer we say it is
many colored. These are its characteristics.” We first teach the
children to distinguish between the characteristics that remain
the same and those that change. Then we say: “If we need a
word to describe what remains the same, that is a noun. And if
we need a word for what changes on the thing that remains the
same, that is an adjective.” Then you teach the children the
concept of activity: “Sit on your chair. You are a good child.
Good is an adjective. But now stand up and walk. You are doing
something. That is an activity. The word you need to describe
this activity is a verb.”
In this way we try to lead the children to the fact, and then
we make the transition from the fact to the words. By using
this method, we will be able to teach the children, without
doing too much damage, the meaning of noun, article, adjec-
tive, and verb. It is most difficult to understand the nature of an
article, because the children cannot yet grasp the relationship
between an article and a noun. We shall have to flounder about
in abstractions to teach the children the definition of an article.
But they must learn it. It is better to flounder in abstractions
(since we are dealing anyway with something synthetic) than to
invent all sorts of artificial ways of explaining to children the
significance and nature of an article, which is impossible.
In short, it will be good for us to teach in full consciousness
of the fact that we are bringing a new element into teaching.
The first school year will afford us plenty of opportunity for

innovation. During the second year, too, a great deal of this
sort of innovation will creep in. But there will be much in the
first year that is enormously beneficial for the growing child. It
will encompass not only writing but also elementary painting
and drawing, since we need them as our starting point for writ-
ing. We shall not just teach singing during the first year but
also start instruction in music in a simple way, with the help of
instruments. From the beginning we will not only let the chil-
dren sing but also guide them toward an instrument. This will
benefit them greatly. We will teach them the first elements of
listening to the relationship between notes. And we will try to
hold the balance between bringing out the musical element
from within through song and listening to the tonal element
from outside or producing notes through an instrument.
All these things—painting-drawing, drawing-painting, and
also finding their way into the musical realm—will be a won-
derful way to develop the children’s will during their first year
at school; this focus is almost totally removed from present-day
schools. If we can also guide these little children from ordinary
gymnastics into eurythmy, we shall be promoting their will
development to a very special degree.
I have been handed a curriculum for the first year of school-
ing. It says:
Religion 2 lessons / week

German 11 lessons / week
Writing (no specified number, but it is taught
at length in the German lessons)
Local Geography 2 lessons / week
Arithmetic 4 lessons / week
Singing & Gymnastics 1 lesson / week.
We will not follow this guide, for if we did, we would be sin-

ning too much against the welfare of growing children. Instead,
we will arrange, insofar as possible, to have the singing and
music and the gymnastics and eurythmy in the afternoon and
all the other subjects in the morning. In moderation, until we
think they have had enough, we will practice singing and music
and also gymnastics and eurythmy in the afternoon with the
children. To set aside only one lesson a week for these subjects
is quite ridiculous. This alone must prove to you how the
whole of teaching today is aimed at the intellect.
During the first year of elementary school we are dealing
with children who are only six or a few months older. When
they are this age we can quite well practice the elements of
drawing and painting, and also music, with them, and we can
perform gymnastics and eurythmy. But if we give them religion
lessons in the style of today, we are certainly not teaching them
religion but merely giving them a form of memory training,
which is about the only good thing that can be said about it. It
is utterly nonsensical to speak to six- or seven-year-old children
about the concepts that play a part in religion. All they can do
is memorize them. Memory training, of course, has positive
aspects, but we must be aware of the fact that we are presenting
to the children all sorts of concepts for which they have abso-
lutely no understanding as yet.
There is something else written down in this schedule for the
first year of school about which we shall think, or at least act, in
a way that differs from the usual. During the second year it
appears even more prominently as a separate subject—good
penmanship. Since we shall let writing evolve out of painting
and drawing, there will be no need for us to draw a distinction
between poor penmanship and good penmanship. We shall try
not to distinguish between bad writing and good writing, and
to ensure that all our writing lessons are such that the children
always write well, so well that they need never distinguish

between good penmanship and bad penmanship. (This is pos-
sible despite the external curriculum.) If we take pains to con-
verse with the children for a long time and let them do plenty
of retelling, making an effort ourselves to speak correctly, we
will be able to introduce the matter of right or wrong spelling
by making a few corrections, without distinguishing the two as
different aspects of learning to write.
In this regard we will have to watch ourselves carefully. We
Austrians have to deal with a particular difficulty as teachers
because in Austria, in addition to vernacular speech and edu-
cated speech, we have a third element—special Austrian
“school speech.” In this form of speech, all the long vowels are
pronounced short and the short vowels long. If the vernacular
said “Sun” and educated speech said “Sonne,” school speech
would say “Sohne.” You cannot help getting into this habit,
and constantly revert to it, like a cat falling on its feet. It is very
upsetting for the teacher as well. And the farther south you go
the worse it is, until you find this problem at its worst in
Southern Austria. If vernacular speech says “Su” [the son],
school speech says “Son.” So you end up using the word Son
instead of Sohn for “boy” and Sohne instead of Sonne for what
shines in the heavens. But this is only the most extreme case.
But when we converse with the children, if we are careful to
pronounce long what is long, short what is short, sharp what is
sharp, drawn out what is drawn out, and soft what is soft, we
shall create for them the necessary foundation for correct spell-
ing. We must also watch carefully what the children do, cor-
recting them and seeing to it that they speak properly all the
time. During the first year we need not do much more than
create the proper foundations. With regard to spelling, we can
remain in the realm of speaking for as long as possible and let it
merge with actual correct spelling last of all. This is the kind of
thing that must be taken into consideration when it comes to

approaching in the right way the children who stand at the
beginning of their school life.
The children who come to us at the end of their school days,
the thirteen- to fourteen-year-olds, are already warped by too
intellectual an education. Too much emphasis has been laid on
the intellect in the way they have been taught. They have expe-
rienced far too little of the blessings of also having their will
and feeling life developed. Consequently, we will have to make
up for lost ground in these spheres just in these last few years.
We will have to seize every opportunity to try to bring will and
feeling into what is merely intellectual by taking much that the
children have absorbed purely intellectually and transforming
it into something that also stirs the will and feeling.
For instance, we can assume with absolute certainty that the
children who come to us at this age will have been taught the
Pythagorean theorem wrongly, not in the right way that we have
discussed here. The question now is how we can contrive to give
the children not only what they have missed but also something
more, so that certain forces that have dried up and withered
may be enlivened anew to whatever extent is still possible. Let
us remind these children about the Pythagorean theorem. We
will say: “You have learned it; now tell me what it says. You see,
you have just told me the theorem of Pythagoras, which is that
the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares
on the other two sides.” But we can be certain that there is
nothing in the soul of the children that ought to have pene-
trated as a result of learning the Pythagorean theorem.
I now do something more. I show the children the theorem
as a picture and explain how it is developed. I let the picture
arise in a specific way. I say, “Three of you, come up to the
blackboard. The first can cover this area with chalk; everyone
watch to make sure that no more chalk is used than needed to
cover the area. The second can cover this other area using
another chalk.” And then I say to the child who has covered the
square on the hypotenuse with chalk, “Look, you have used
just as much chalk as the other two children together. You have
spread as much chalk on this square as the other two together,
because the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the
squares on the other two sides.” In other words, I let the child
get a picture by using the chalk. The children get more deeply
into it with their soul by thinking about how much some of the
chalk has worn away, so that it is no longer on the stick of chalk
but on the blackboard.
Then I go a step further and say, “Now I am going to divide

the squares—one into 16 smaller squares, another into nine
squares, and the last into 25 squares. One of you will stand in
the middle of each square and imagine that it is a field that you
have had to plow. The child who has dug the 25 small squares
in this big square has worked just as hard as those children who
have dug the 16 small squares and nine small squares put
together. Through your work, the square on the hypotenuse
has been dug over and so has the square on each of the other
two sides.” In this way I link the theorem of Pythagoras with
something that has a will influence in the children, something
that lets them imagine themselves doing meaningful work with

their will outside in the world. I bring to life a theorem that
they have had planted in their heads in a rather dead way.
Let us now assume that these children have learned Latin
and Greek. I will attempt to bring them to the point where
they not only speak Latin and Greek, but also listen methodi-
cally when one of them speaks Latin and another Greek. And I
try to bring vividly to life for them the difference between the
life of the Greek and the life of the Latin. I would not need to
do this in the course of ordinary teaching, since it would come
about intrinsically in the ideal curriculum. But we need to
make this point with the children who come to us, because we
must teach them to feel that when they speak Greek, they
speak only with their larynx and their chest. When they speak
Latin, on the other hand, something of their whole being rever-
berates with the language. The children’s attention must be
drawn to this difference.
I must also make them aware of the living quality of French
when they speak that language and its very close resemblance
to Latin. They must realize that when they speak English, they
almost spit out the sounds. The chest is less involved than
when speaking French—much is cast off. Some syllables are lit-
erally spat out before they have their full effect. You need not
actually say “spit out” to the children, but you must make them
understand that in English a word dies off toward the end. In
this way you try to bring the element of articulation with par-
ticular clarity when teaching languages to children of thirteen
and fourteen who have come to you from today’s schools.
Lecture Fourteen
SEPTEMBER 5, 1919
If you were to look at the sort of curriculum still being dis-

seminated until quite recently—a mere fifty or sixty years
ago—you would see that it was relatively brief. A few short sen-
tences described what was to be studied in the different sub-
jects each year. Such a curriculum covered at most two to four
pages; all the rest in those days was left to the actual practice of
teaching. The practice of teaching itself, out of its own needs
and its own powers, was to stimulate the teachers to do what
they should with the curriculum.
Things are different today. The curriculum for secondary
schools has swollen to the proportions of a book called Official
Document. It stipulates not only what must be achieved, but
also contains all sorts of instructions on how to do things in
school. In recent decades we have been allowing education to
be swallowed by state legislation. Perhaps it is the dream of
many a legislator eventually to reintroduce everything that used
to be contained in the old literature on education as official
publications and decrees. Socialist leaders certainly have this
intent in their subconscious. Today they are embarrassed to say
this openly, but it is certainly there in the subconscious; their
ideal is to regulate what until a short while ago belonged to the
domain of free culture, even in the sphere of education.
Consequently, those of us who want to preserve the educa-
tional system and teaching from its collapse under Lenin, which
could spread to Central Europe, must approach our under-

standing of curriculum in quite a different way. Our stance
toward the so-called Official Document must be different from
that of ordinary teachers. They have taken it very seriously both
under the monarchy and during the era of ordinary democratic
parliamentarianism. But they will view it with particularly ser-
vile feelings once it is sent to them by their dictatorial comrades.
The tyranny inherent in socialism would be felt with particular
strength in the realm of teaching and education.
We must view the curriculum in a very different way. Our
approach has been such that we must put ourselves in the posi-
tion of being able to create it ourselves at any moment; we
must be able to read from the seventh through tenth years of
childhood what we ought to do during these years. Tomorrow
we shall juxtapose the ideal curriculum with what is now most
prevalent in other Central European schools. We can prepare
ourselves thoroughly for the concluding remarks by getting a
feeling for all that must be absorbed before we can understand
the curriculum.
There is another exceptionally important aspect that is rather
misjudged in today’s official educational circles. At the close of
my previous lecture, I spoke about the morality of education.1
The morality of education must be practiced in our class les-
sons. But this becomes actual practice in the classroom only
when we avoid many of the examples provided by books on
education. Such books speak about object lessons. There is
nothing inherently wrong with these, and we have discussed
how to conduct such lessons. Again and again, however, we
have had to stress that they must never be allowed to become
trivial and that they should never exceed a certain limit. The
eternal cross-examination of the students on obvious matters in
1. See lecture 14 in The Foundations of Human Experience.

Lecture Fourteen 179
object lessons spreads an unnecessary cloud of boredom over

the lessons. It deprives the lessons of the very element I stressed
as being so important at the end of my lecture an hour ago: the
development of the children's imaginative capacity.2
Speaking comparatively, if you discuss with your students
the shape of a saucepan by way of an object lesson, you will
undermine their imaginative faculty. You will do much better
than what passes today as an object lesson, if you discuss with
them the shape of a Grecian urn and leave them to use their
own soul forces to carry these thoughts over to an understand-
ing of an ordinary cooking pot. Object lessons as they are given
today often literally stifle the imagination. It is not at all a bad
idea to leave a good deal unsaid in teaching, so that the chil-
dren are induced to engage their soul forces with what they
have absorbed during lessons. It is not at all beneficial to
explain everything in the lesson, down to the last dot on the i.
When you do this, the children leave school with the feeling
that they have learned everything already and begin to look for
some form of mischief. If, on the other hand, you plant seeds
for their imagination, they remain interested in what was
offered during the lessons and are less inclined to seek out mis-
chief. That our children today turn into such troublemakers is
solely because we give them too much of the wrong sort of
object lesson and too little appropriate training for their feel-
ings and will.
There is still another way in which it is necessary for our
souls to become intimately linked with the curriculum. When
children come to you during the early years of school, they are
quite different beings from the same children at the ages of
thirteen through fifteen. During these years, children are very
much bodily beings; they are still very much immersed in their
2. See lecture 14 in The Foundations of Human Experience.

bodies. When the time comes for them to leave school at the
age of fourteen or fifteen, you must have implanted in them
the capacity no longer to cling to the body with all the fibers of
the soul but to be independent of their bodies in thinking, feel-
ing, and willing. If you try to immerse yourselves somewhat
more profoundly in the nature of the growing human being,
you will find that during the early school years children still
possess relatively healthy instincts, particularly if they have not
been spoiled.
In these years children do not yet have such a craving to stuff
themselves with sweets and such. They still have certain
healthy instincts with regard to food, just as an animal has very
good instincts with regard to food because it is completely
immersed in its body. The animal avoids what is bad for it. It is
certainly an exception in the animal world for an evil to spread
in the way alcohol has spread in the world of human beings.
The spread of such evils as alcohol is due solely to the fact that
human beings are spiritual beings and can become so indepen-
dent of their physical natures. The physical body is far too sen-
sible ever to be tempted to become an alcoholic. Relatively
healthy instincts with respect to food still live in children dur-
ing the early school years. For the sake of the individual's devel-
opment, these impulses fade away at the ages of thirteen to
fifteen. When puberty finally overtakes children, they lose their
good instincts with regard to food; they have to replace with
reason what their intuition gave them in earlier years.
This is why you can intercept, as it were, the last manifesta-
tions of the growing child's instincts about food and health at
the ages of thirteen to fifteen. You can still just catch the tail
end of a healthy regard for food, for growth, and so on. Later,
you can no longer reach an inner feeling for proper nutrition
and health care. In these years the children must receive
instruction on nutrition and health care for the human being.
This is the proper subject for object lessons. Object lessons can
support the imaginative faculty very well. Show the children
(or remind them that such things exist, for they will have seen
them before) a substance that consists mainly of starch or sugar,
one that is chiefly fat, and another composed mainly of pro-
tein. The children know these differences, but remind them
that it is generally from these three ingredients that the activity
of the human organism proceeds.
Taking this as your point of departure, you can explain to
the children the mysteries of nutrition. Then you can exactly
describe the breathing process and develop for them concepts
related to the care of the human being's health through nutri-
tion and breathing. You will gain enormous benefits in terms of
your teaching by instructing them in this way during these
years, for you will intercept the last manifestations of the
instinct for what is health-giving and nutritious. You can teach
children about conditions of nutrition and health at this time
without making them egotistic for the whole of their later life.
It is still natural for children of this age to fulfil their health and
nutritional needs instinctively. Accordingly, you can speak
about the subject, and what you say will be met by an innate
understanding that is natural to human beings and does not
make them egotistic.
If children are not taught about the conditions of health and
nutrition at this time, they have to inform themselves later by
reading or from information others give them. The knowledge
that comes to people after puberty, by whatever means, with
regard to the conditions of nutrition and health produces ego-
tism in them. It is entirely unavoidable. If you read about
nutritional physiology, if you read a summary of the rules of
health care, you become more egotistic than you were; it is
inherent in the very nature of the subject. The egotism that
originates in our becoming acquainted through reason with the
way we have to take care of ourselves must be fought with

morality. If we did not have to care for ourselves physically, we
should need no morality in our souls. But people are less
exposed to the dangers of egotism later in life if they are taught
about nutrition and health care at the age of thirteen or four-
teen, when such instruction does not yet make for egotism but
supports what is natural to the human being.
You see to what a degree the very questions of life are embed-
ded in the right moment for teaching different subjects to
human beings. You make provision for the whole of life if you
teach the human being the right things at the proper time. It
would be best of all if we could teach the seven- and
eight-year-olds about nutrition and health care. Then they
would absorb this knowledge in the most selfless way, because
they still hardly know that it refers to them. They would regard
themselves as an object and not as a subject. But they cannot
understand enough at that age; their power of judgment has not
developed sufficiently for them to understand. Consequently,
we cannot teach the subjects of nutrition and health care in
these early years. We must save these subjects for when children
reach the age of thirteen or fourteen. This is the age when the
fire of their instinct for nutrition and health is beginning to fade
but when the presence of the capacity to comprehend compen-
sates for the fading of this intuition. With older children there
will be every opportunity to mention almost as an aside many
things that relate to health and nutrition: in natural history, in
physics, in lessons that expand on geography, even in history.
You will see that it is not necessary to include these two as
subjects in the timetable; much in the lessons must live in a way
that enables us to let it mingle with the other subjects we teach.
If we have an understanding of what the children ought to be
taking in, then they themselves, or the whole community of
children gathered in the school, will tell us daily what we ought
to be including by way of interspersed remarks in our lessons.

They will let us know how we have to develop a certain presence
of mind just because we are teachers. If we have been drilled as
subject teachers of geography or history, we will not develop this
presence of mind, for our aim will be to teach nothing but his-
tory from the beginning of the history lesson to the end. In this
circumstance, exceptionally unnatural conditions are created—
their damaging effects on life have not been fully considered as
yet. It is an intimate truth that we benefit human beings, we do
something that prevents egotism from developing excessively, if
we teach them about nutrition and health care at the age of thir-
teen or fourteen in the way I have described to you.
Many things can permeate with feeling the whole way we
teach our lessons. If you attach a feeling element wherever you
can to your subject matter, what you want to achieve in your
teaching remains with the students for the rest of their lives. If
you teach only what appeals to reason and intellect when the
children between thirteen and fifteen, not much will remain
with them later. Accordingly, it must be your intention to per-
meate with feeling in your own being whatever you impart in
an imaginative way during these years. You must try to present
geography, history, and natural history in a vivid and graphic
way that is nonetheless filled with feeling. To the imaginative
element must be added the feeling element.
With regard to the curriculum, the time between the ages of
seven and fourteen or fifteen does indeed fall clearly into the
three divisions outlined here. Up to the age of nine we teach
the growing child mainly the conventional subjects—writing
and reading. Up to age twelve we continue the more conven-
tional subjects, as well as subjects based on the human power of
judgment. As you have seen, we study the animal and plant
kingdoms, because at this age children still have a certain
instinctive sense of the relationships that play into these realms.
I have shown you during our lectures on teaching methods

how you should convey an idea of the relationship of the
human being to the whole world of nature—cuttlefish, mouse,
lamb, and human being.3 We have also made a great effort
(which I hope will not be in vain, for it will bear flowers and
fruit during the botany lessons) to impart a sense of the human
being's relationship to the plant world. These subjects should
be elaborated through mental pictures filled with feeling dur-
ing the middle period of a child’s life, while an innate under-
standing of the animals and plants is still present. This is the
time when human beings easily experience themselves at one
moment to be cats, and at the next wolves, lions, or eagles,
even if not with the ordinary light of reasoning consciousness.
Children still have this feeling of being first one creature and
then another until just after the age of nine. Before that age it is
stronger, but they cannot penetrate it, because the necessary
power for understanding it does not exist. If children are very
precocious and talk about themselves a great deal at the age of
four or five, they will frequently compare themselves to eagles,
mice, and so on. But if, in their ninth year, we set about teaching
children natural history in the way we have indicated, we will
still encounter a wealth of related instinctive feeling in them.
Later, this instinct matures to the point where they also have an
understanding of being related to the plant world. Conse-
quently, we first teach the natural history of the animal kingdom
and then the natural history of the plant kingdom. We reserve
the minerals until the last, because to understand the minerals
requires almost nothing but the power of judgment, and this
effort does not call upon anything through which the human
being is related to the outside world. The human being is not
related to the mineral kingdom. More than any other, it is the
3. See discussion 8 in Discussions with Teachers.

mineral kingdom that we must dissolve, as I have shown you.4

Human beings do not even tolerate salt that is not dissolved in
the organism; as soon as they take it in, they have to dissolve it.
It lies very much within the nature of the human being to
arrange the curriculum in the manner suggested. There is a
beautiful balance in this middle period from the ages of nine to
eleven between instinctive capacities and the power of judg-
ment. We can always be sure that the child will meet us with
understanding if we count on a certain instinctive comprehen-
sion and if we do not describe things too graphically, particu-
larly in natural history and botany. We must avoid external
analogies, particularly with reference to the plant world, for
this really goes against the grain of natural feeling. Natural feel-
ing is in itself predisposed to seek qualities of soul in plants—
not the external physical form of the human being in this or
that tree but soul relationships such as we have just tried to dis-
cover in the plant system.
The actual power of judgment that lets us count on rea-
soned, intellectual understanding belongs to the last of the
three periods of childhood. That is why we use the twelfth year,
when the child is moving toward an understanding based on
judgment, to let this power of judgment merge with what still
requires a kind of instinct, even though it is already strongly
overshadowed by the power of judgment. Here we find the twi-
light instincts of the soul that have to be overcome by the
power of judgment.
We must take into account that during this stage the human
being has an innate sense for the calculation of interest rates,
for what can be raked in as profit, for the principle of discount,
and so on. This information appeals to the instincts. But we
must let the power of judgment be much stronger; during this
4. See Foundations of Human Experience, lecture 12.

period we must deal with the relationships that exist among the
element of calculation, the circulation of commodities, and the
ownership of property and wealth. In other words, we must
concern ourselves with percentage and interest calculations,
discount calculations, and similar matters.
It is exceedingly important that we not teach the children
these concepts too late. If we do, it means that we can count
only on their egoism. We do not deal with egoism if, toward
age twelve, we begin to teach them about concepts of monetary
transactions and commerce. Actual bookkeeping can be
addressed later; it involves more reasoning. To teach them these
concepts at this age is very important for them, because the
inner selfish feelings for interest rates, bonds, and so on are not
yet stirring in children who are so young. When they are older
and enter business schools, such concepts become rather more
serious.
Such are the elements of teaching that you must take to heart.
Try not to overdo, for instance, when you are describing the
plants. Particularly in plant lessons, you should try to teach in a
way that leaves a great deal to the children's imagination, so that
out of their own feelings they can imaginatively form the soul
connections between the human soul and the plant world.
Those teachers who wax too enthusiastic about object lessons
simply do not know that the human being also has to be taught
about things that are not visible externally. And if, by means of
object lessons, we try to teach human beings particular subjects
that we ought to teach through working on them in a moral and
feeling way, we do them actual harm. We must not forget that
mere observation and demonstration of things is very much a
by-product of the materialistic views of our age. Of course,
observation should be cultivated in its proper place, but it is
wrong to transform into observation what is more suitably
imparted through a moral and feeling influence working from
teacher to student. I believe that you have now taken in enough

to make it possible for us to form our curriculum.
***
With this, Rudolf Steiner ended these lectures. On the following
day, he gave three lectures on the appropriate curriculum and out-
lined the goals of teaching in various subjects for students of differ-
ent ages.5 He pointed out the subjects that might be connected in
the way they are presented. At the end of those lectures, Steiner
made the following concluding remarks:
Today I would like to conclude these discussions by pointing
out something I want to lay upon your hearts; I would like you
to stick firmly to the following four principles.
First, teachers must make sure that they influence and work
on their students, in a broader sense, by allowing the spirit to
flow through their whole being as teachers, and also in the
details of their work: how each word is spoken, and how each
concept or feeling is developed. Teachers must be people of ini-
tiative. They must be filled with initiative. Teachers must never
be careless or lazy; they must, at every moment, stand in full
consciousness of what they do in the school and how they act
toward the children. This is the first principle. The teacher must
be a person of initiative in everything done, great and small.
Second, my dear friends, we as teachers must take an interest
in everything happening in the world and in whatever concerns
humankind. All that is happening in the outside world and in
human life must arouse our interest. It would be deplorable if we
as teachers were to shut ourselves off from anything that might
interest human beings. We should take an interest in the affairs
of the outside world, and we should also be able to enter into
5. The lectures on curriculum are included in Discussions with Teachers.

anything, great or small, that concerns every single child in our

care. That is the second principle. The teacher should be one who
is interested in the being of the whole world and of humanity.
Third, the teacher must be one who never compromises in the
heart and mind with what is untrue. Teachers must be true in the
depths of their being. Teachers must never compromise with
untruth, because if they did, we would see how untruth would
find its way through many channels into our teaching, especially
in the way we present the subjects. Our teaching will only bear
the stamp of truth when we ardently strive for truth in ourselves.
And now comes something more easily said than done, but
it is, nevertheless, also a golden rule for the teacher’s calling.
The teacher must never get stale or grow sour. Cherish a mood of
soul that is fresh and healthy! No getting stale and sour! This
must be the teacher’s endeavor.
And I know, my dear friends, that if during these two weeks
you have properly received into your inner life what we were
able to shed light on from the most diverse viewpoints, then
indirectly, through the realms of feeling and will, what may still
seem remote will come closer to your souls as you work with
the children in the classroom. During these two weeks I have
spoken only of what can enter directly into your practical
teaching when you first allow it to work properly within your
own souls. But our Waldorf school, my dear friends, will
depend on what you do within yourselves, and whether you
really allow the things we have considered to become effective
in your own souls.
Think of the many things I have tried to clarify in order to
come to a psychological view of the human being, especially of
the growing human being. Remember these things. And maybe
there will be moments when you feel unsure about how or
when to bring one thing or another into your teaching, or
where to introduce it, but if you remember properly what has
been presented during these two weeks, then thoughts will

surely arise in you that will tell you what to do. Of course,
many things should really be said many times, but I do not
want to make you into teaching machines, but into free, inde-
pendent teachers. Everything spoken of during the past two
weeks was given to you in this same spirit. The time has been
so short that, for the rest, I must simply appeal to the under-
standing and devotion you will bring to your work.
Turn your thoughts again and again to all that has been said
that can lead you to understand the human being, and espe-
cially the child. It will help you in all the many questions of
method that may arise.
When you look back in memory to these discussions, then
our thoughts will certainly meet again in all the various impulses
that have come to life during this time. For myself, I can assure
you that I will also be thinking back to these days, because right
now this Waldorf school is indeed weighing heavily on the
minds of those taking part in its beginning and organization.
This Waldorf school must succeed; much depends on its success.
Its success will bring a kind of proof of many things in the spiri-
tual evolution of humankind that we must represent.
In conclusion, if you will allow me to speak personally for a
moment, I would like to say: For me this Waldorf school will
be a veritable child of concern. Again and again I will have to
come back to this Waldorf school with anxious, caring
thoughts. But when we keep in mind the deep seriousness of
the situation, we can really work well together. Let us especially
keep before us the thought, which will truly fill our hearts and
minds, that connected with the present-day spiritual move-
ment are also the spiritual powers that guide the cosmos. When
we believe in these good spiritual powers they will inspire our
lives and we will truly be able to teach.
Bibliography
Books by Rudolf Steiner:

Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts: Anthroposophy as a Path of Knowledge
and The Michael Mystery, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1985.
Anthroposophy (A Fragment), Catherine Creeger & Detlef Hardorp,
trans., Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996.
Anthroposophy in Everyday Life, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY,
1995 (contains “The Four Temperaments”).
Architecture as a Synthesis of the Arts (including Ways to a New Style in
Architecture), Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1999.
Art As Seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom, Rudolf Steiner Press, London,
1996.
Art As Spiritual Activity: Rudolf Steiner’s Contribution to the Visual Arts,
introduced and edited by Michael Howard, Anthroposophic Press,
Hudson, NY, 1998.
Aspects of Human Evolution, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1987.
Autobiography: Chapters in the Course of My Life, 1861–1907, Anthropo-
sophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1999.
The Boundaries of Natural Science, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley,
NY, 1983.
The Calendar of the Soul, William & Liselotte Mann, trans., Hawthorn
Press, Stroud, UK, 1990.
The Calendar of the Soul, Ruth & Hans Pusch, trans., Anthroposophic
Press, Hudson, NY, 1988.
Christianity as Mystical Fact, Andrew Welburn, trans., Anthroposophic
Colour, Rudolf Steiner Press, Sussex, UK, 1992.
Curative Eurythmy, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1983.
The East in the Light of the West & “Children of Lucifer,” a Drama by
Edouard Schuré, Spiritual Science Library, Blauvelt, NY, 1986.
Economics: The World as One Economy, New Economy Publications, Bris-
tol, UK, 1993.
Education As an Art (with other authors, Paul Allen, ed.), Steinerbooks,
Blauvelt, NY, 1988.
Bibliography 191
Education for Special Needs: The Curative Education Course, Rudolf

Steiner Press, London, 1998.
Egyptian Myths and Mysteries, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1997.
Extending Practical Medicine: Fundamental Principles Based on the Science
of the Spirit (Dr. Ita Wegman, co-author), Rudolf Steiner Press,
London, 1996 (previous trans., Fundamentals of Therapy).
Eurythmy As Visible Music, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, n.d.
Eurythmy As Visible Speech, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1984.
The Evolution of the Earth and Man and the Influence of the Stars, Anthro-
posophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1987.
The Foundation Stone / The Life, Nature, and Cultivation of Anthroposo-
phy, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1996 (previously published as
separate volumes).
The Fruits of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1986.
Health and Illness: Lectures to the Workmen, 2 vols. Anthroposophic Press,
Hudson, NY, 1983.
How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation, Christopher
Bamford, trans., Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1994.
Human and Cosmic Thought, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1991.
The Human Being in Body, Soul, and Spirit, Anthroposophic Press, Hud-
son, NY, 1989.
The Inner Nature of Man and Our Life Between Death & Rebirth, Anthro-
The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone, Anthroposophic
An Introduction to Eurythmy: Talks Given before Sixteen Eurythmy Perfor-
mances, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1984.
Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom, Michael
Lipson, trans., Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY,1995.
Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies, 8 vols., Rudolf Steiner Press, Lon-
don, 1974–1997.
Light: First Scientific Lecture-Course (Light-Course), Steiner Schools Fel-
lowship Publications, East Sussex, UK, 1987.
Man and the World of Stars: The Spiritual Communion of Mankind,
Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1963.
Nature’s Open Secret: Introductions to Goethe’s Scientific Writings, J. Barnes
& M. Spiegler, trans., Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 2000.
Occult Science, An Outline, George & Mary Adams, trans., Rudolf
Steiner Press, London, 1989.
An Outline of Esoteric Science, Catherine Creeger, trans., Anthroposophic

An Outline of Occult Science, Henry Monges, trans., Anthroposophic
Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1972.
Pastoral Medicine, Mercury Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1987.
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: A Philosophy of Freedom, Rita Steb-
bing, trans., Rudolf Steiner Press, Bristol, UK, 1988.
Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind: West and East, Materialism and
Mysticism, Knowledge and Belief, Rudolf Steiner Press, London,
1987.
The Portal of Initiation: A Rosicrucian Mystery Drama / Fairy Tale of the
Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (by Johann W. von Goethe), Spiri-
tual Science Library, Blauvelt, NY, 1981.
Prayers for Parents and Children, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1995.
The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Connection with Questions of Rein-
carnation, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1986.
A Psychology of Body, Soul & Spirit: Anthroposophy, Psychosophy, Pneuma-
tosophy, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1999.
Psychoanalysis & Spiritual Psychology, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson,
NY, 1990.
Reincarnation and Karma: Two Fundamental Truths of Human Existence,
Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1992.
Rhythms of Learning: What Waldorf Education Offers Parents, Teachers &
Children, introduced and edited by Roberto Trostli, Anthropo-
sophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1998.
The Social Future, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1972.
Social Issues: Meditative Thinking and the Threefold Social Order, Anthro-
Speech and Drama, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1959.
The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity, Anthroposophic
Spiritual Science and Medicine, Steinerbooks, Blauvelt, NY, 1989.
Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in
the Cosmos, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1994.
Theosophy of the Rosicrucian, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1981.
Therapeutic Insights: Earthly and Cosmic Laws, Mercury Press, Spring Val-
ley, NY, 1984.
Toward Imagination: Culture and the Individual, Anthroposophic Press,
Hudson, NY, 1990.
Bibliography 193
Truth-Wrought-Words: with Other Verses and Prose Passages, Anthropo-

sophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1979.
The Twelve Moods, Mercury Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1984.
The Universal Human: The Evolution of Individuality, Anthroposophic
Universe, Earth and Man, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1987.
Verses and Meditations, Rudolf Steiner Press, Bristol, UK, 1993.
Warmth Course, Mercury Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1988.
Wonders of the World, Ordeals of the Soul, Revelations of the Spirit, Rudolf
Steiner Press, 1983.
The World of the Senses and the World of the Spirit, Rudolf Steiner
Research Foundation,1990.
The Younger Generation, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1984.
Other Authors:
Anschütz, Marieke, Children and Their Temperaments, Floris Books,
Edinburgh, 1995.
Barnes, Christy MacKaye, ed., For the Love of Literature: A Celebration of
Language and Imagination, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY,
1996.
Barnes, Henry, A Life for the Spirit: Rudolf Steiner in the Crosscurrents of
Our Time, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1997.
Britz-Crecelius, Heidi, Children at Play: Using Waldorf Principles to Foster
Childhood Development, Park Street Press, Rochester, VT, 1996.
Carnie, Fiona; Martin Large; Mary Tasker, eds., Freeing Education: Steps
towards Real Choice and Diversity in Schools, Hawthorn Press,
Stroud, UK, 1996.
Childs, Gilbert, Education and Beyond: Steiner and the Problems of Mod-
ern Society, Floris Books, Edinburgh, 1996.
——,Steiner Education in Theory and Practice, Floris Books, Edinburgh,
1991.
——,Truth, Beauty and Goodness: Steiner-Waldorf Education As a
Demand of Our Time—An Esoteric Study, Temple Lodge Publish-
ing, 1999.
——,Understand Your Temperament! A Guide to the Four Temperaments,
Sophia Books, London, 1995.
Childs, Gilbert & Sylvia Childs, Your Reincarnating Child, Sophia
Books, London, 1995.
Edmunds, Francis, Renewing Education: Selected Writings on Steiner Edu-

cation, Hawthorn Press, Stroud, UK, 1992.
——,Rudolf Steiner Education: The Waldorf School, Rudolf Steiner Press,
London, 1992.
Fenner, Pamela Johnson and Karen L. Rivers, Waldorf Student Reading
List, 3rd ed., Michaelmas Press, Amesbury, Mass, 1995.
Finser, Torin, School As a Journey: The Eight-Year Odyssey of a Waldorf
Teacher and His Class, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1994.
Gabert, Erich, Educating the Adolescent: Discipline or Freedom, Anthro-
Gardner, John, Education in Search of the Spirit: Essays on American Edu-
cation, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996.
——,Youth Longs to Know: Explorations of the Spirit in Education,
Gatto, John Taylor, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Com-
pulsory Schooling, New Society, Philadelphia, 1992.
Heydebrand, Caroline von, Childhood: A Study of the Growing Child,
Jaffke, Freya, Work and Play in Early Childhood, Anthroposophic Press,
Hudson, NY, 1996.
Kirchner-Bockholt, Margarete, M.D., Fundamental Principles of Curative
Eurythmy, Temple Lodge, London, 1992.
Large, Martin, Who’s Bringing Them Up? How to Break the T.V. Habit!
Hawthorn Press, Stroud, UK, 1990.
Lievegoed, Bernard, Phases of Childhood: Growing in Body, Soul & Spirit,
Anthroposophic Press, 1997.
Logan, Arnold, ed., A Garden of Songs for Singing and Piping at Home
and School, Windrose Publishing and Educational Services,
Chatham, NY, 1996.
Maher, Stanford & Ralph Shepherd, eds., Standing on the Brink—An
Education for the 21st Century: Essays on Waldorf Education, Novalis
Press, Cape Town, 1995.
Pusch, Ruth, ed., Waldorf Schools Volume 1: Kindergarten and Early
Grades, Mercury Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1993.
——,Waldorf Schools Volume 2: Upper Grades and High School, Mercury
Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1993.
Richards, M. C., Opening Our Moral Eye: Essays, Talks, & Poems Embrac-
ing Creativity & Community, Lindisfarne Books, Hudson, NY,
1996.
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Schwartz, Eugene, Millennial Child: Transforming Education in the

Twenty-First Century, Anthroposophic Press, 1999.
Spock, Marjorie, Teaching as a Lively Art, Anthroposophic Press, Hud-
son, NY, 1985.
Wachsmuth, Guenther, The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner, Garber
Communications, Blauvelt, NY, 1989.
Wilkinson, Roy, The Spiritual Basis of Steiner Education: The Waldorf
School Approach, Sophia Books, London, 1996.
Zimmermann, Heinz, Speaking, Listening, Understanding: The Art of
Conscious Conversation, Lindisfarne Books, 1996.
T H E F O U N D AT I O N S
O F WA L D O R F E D U C AT I O N
T H E F I R S T F R E E WA L D O R F S C H O O L opened its doors in

Stuttgart, Germany, in September 1919, under the auspices of Emil Molt,
director of the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Company and a student of
Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science, and particularly of Steiner’s call for
social renewal.
It was only the previous year—amid the social chaos following the
end of World War I—that Emil Molt, responding to Steiner’s prognosis
that truly human change would not be possible unless a sufficient num-
ber of people received an education that developed the whole human
being, decided to create a school for his workers’ children. Conversations
with the minister of education and with Rudolf Steiner in early 1919
then led rapidly to the forming of the first school.
Since that time, more than six hundred schools have opened around
the globe—from Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Great
Britain, Norway, Finland, and Sweden to Russia, Georgia, Poland, Hun-
gary, Romania, Israel, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Argen-
tina, Japan, and others—making the Waldorf school movement the
largest independent school movement in the world. The United States,
Canada, and Mexico alone now have more than 120 schools.
Although each Waldorf school is independent, and although there is
a healthy oral tradition going back to the first Waldorf teachers and to
Steiner himself, as well as a growing body of secondary literature, the
true foundations of the Waldorf method and spirit remain the many lec-
tures that Rudolf Steiner gave on the subject. For five years (1919–24),
Rudolf Steiner, while simultaneously working on many other fronts, tire-
lessly dedicated himself to the dissemination of the idea of Waldorf edu-
cation. He gave manifold lectures to teachers, parents, the general
public, and even the children themselves. New schools were founded.
The movement grew.
While many of Steiner’s foundational lectures have been translated
and published in the past, some have never appeared in English, and
many have been virtually unobtainable for years. To remedy this situa-
tion and to establish a coherent basis for Waldorf education, Anthropo-
sophic Press has decided to publish the complete series of Steiner lectures
and writings on education in a uniform series. This series will thus con-
stitute an authoritative foundation for work in educational renewal, for
Waldorf teachers, parents, and educators generally.
Bibliography 197
RUDOLF STEINER’S LECTURES

(AN D WR I T IN GS) ON E DU CAT I ON
I. Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik. Pädagogischer

Grundkurs, 14 Lectures, Stuttgart, 1919 (GA 293). Previously Study of Man.
The Foundations of Human Experience (Anthroposophic Press, 1996).
II. Erziehungskunst Methodische-Didaktisches, 14 Lectures, Stuttgart, 1919
(GA 294). Practical Advice to Teachers (Anthroposophic Press, 2000).
III. Erziehungskunst, 15 Discussions, Stuttgart, 1919 (GA 295). Discus-
sions with Teachers (Anthroposophic Press, 1997).
IV. Die Erziehungsfrage als soziale Frage, 6 Lectures, Dornach, 1919 (GA 296).
Education as a Force for Social Change (previously Education as a Social Prob-
lem) (Anthroposophic Press, 1997).
V. Die Waldorf Schule und ihr Geist, 6 Lectures, Stuttgart and Basel, 1919
(GA 297). The Spirit of the Waldorf School (Anthroposophic Press, 1995).
VI. Rudolf Steiner in der Waldorfschule, Vorträge und Ansprachen, Stuttgart,
1919–1924 (GA 298). Rudolf Steiner in the Waldorf School: Lectures and
Conversations (Anthroposophic Press, 1996).
VII. Geisteswissenschaftliche Sprachbetrachtungen, 6 Lectures, Stuttgart, 1919
(GA 299). The Genius of Language (Anthroposophic Press, 1995).
VIII. Konferenzen mit den Lehren der Freien Waldorfschule 1919–1924, 3
Volumes (GA 300a–c). Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner, 2 Volumes
(Anthroposophic Press, 1998).
IX. Die Erneuerung der Pädagogisch-didaktischen Kunst durch Geisteswissen-
schaft, 14 Lectures, Basel, 1920 (GA 301). The Renewal of Education
(Kolisko Archive Publications for Steiner Schools Fellowship Publications,
Michael Hall, Forest Row, East Sussex, UK, 1981).
X. Menschenerkenntnis und Unterrichtsgestaltung, 8 Lectures, Stuttgart,
1921 (GA 302). Previously The Supplementary Course—Upper School and
Waldorf Education for Adolescence. Education for Adolescence (Anthropo-
sophic Press, 1996).
XI. Erziehung und Unterricht aus Menschenerkenntnis, 9 Lectures, Stuttgart,
1920, 1922, 1923 (GA 302a). The first four lectures available as Balance in
Teaching (Mercury Press, 1982); last three lectures as Deeper Insights into
Education (Anthroposophic Press, 1988).
XII. Die Gesunder Entwicklung des Menschenwesens, 16 Lectures, Dornach,
1921–22 (GA 303). Soul Economy and Waldorf Education (Anthropo-
sophic Press, 1986).
XIII. Erziehungs- und Unterrichtsmethoden auf Anthroposophischer Grund-
lage, 9 Public Lectures, various cities, 1921–22 (GA 304). Waldorf Educa-
tion and Anthroposophy 1 (Anthroposophic Press, 1995).
XIV. Anthroposophische Menschenkunde und Pädagogik, 9 Public Lectures,

various cities, 1923–24 (GA 304a). Waldorf Education and Anthroposo-
phy 2 (Anthroposophic Press, 1996).
XV. Die geistig-seelischen Grundkräfte der Erziehungskunst, 12 Lectures, 1
Special Lecture, Oxford 1922 (GA 305). The Spiritual Ground of Educa-
tion (Garber Publications, 1989).
XVI. Die pädagogisch Praxis vom Gesichtspunkte geisteswissenschaftlicher Men-
schenerkenntnis, 8 Lectures, Dornach, 1923 (GA 306). The Child’s Changing
Consciousness As the Basis of Pedagogical Practice (Anthroposophic Press,
1996).
XVII. Gegenwärtiges Geistesleben und Erziehung, 4 Lectures, Ilkeley, 1923 (GA
307). A Modern Art of Education (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981) and Educa-
tion and Modern Spiritual Life (Garber Publications, 1989).
XVIII. Die Methodik des Lehrens und die Lebensbedingungen des Erziehens, 5
Lectures, Stuttgart, 1924 (GA 308). The Essentials of Education (Anthro-
posophic Press, 1997).
XIX. Anthroposophische Pädagogik und ihre Voraussetzungen, 5 Lectures, Bern,
1924 (GA 309). The Roots of Education (Anthroposophic Press, 1997).
XX. Der pädagogische Wert der Menschenerkenntnis und der Kulturwert der
Pädagogik, 10 Public Lectures, Arnheim, 1924 (GA 310). Human Values in
Education (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1971).
XXI. Die Kunst des Erziehens aus dem Erfassen der Menschenwesenheit, 7
Lectures, Torquay, 1924 (GA 311). The Kingdom of Childhood (Anthro-
posophic Press, 1995).
XXII. Geisteswissenschaftliche Impulse zur Entwicklung der Physik. Erster
naturwissenschaftliche Kurs: Licht, Farbe, Ton—Masse, Elektrizität, Magnetis-
mus, 10 Lectures, Stuttgart, 1919–20 (GA 320). The Light Course (Steiner
Schools Fellowship,1977).
XXIII. Geisteswissenschaftliche Impulse zur Entwicklung der Physik. Zweiter
naturwissenschaftliche Kurs: die Wärme auf der Grenze positiver und negativer
Materialität, 14 Lectures, Stuttgart, 1920 (GA 321). The Warmth Course
(Mercury Press, 1988).
XXIV. Das Verhältnis der verschiedenen naturwissenschaftlichen Gebiete zur
Astronomie. Dritter naturwissenschaftliche Kurs: Himmelskunde in Beziehung
zum Menschen und zur Menschenkunde, 18 Lectures, Stuttgart, 1921 (GA
323). Available in typescript only as “The Relation of the Diverse
Branches of Natural Science to Astronomy.”
XXV. The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education (A
collection) (Anthroposophic Press, 1996).
XXVI. Miscellaneous.
Index
A arithmetic, 2–3, 7, 8, 50, 67,

a sound, 20, 21 132, 158
addition, 7 art, permeating all teaching with,
adjectives, 56, 170. See also gram- 4–5
mar and syntax articles (part of speech), 169–70
Aesthetic Education of Man artistic activities, 2, 37
(Goethe), 103 artistic capacities, encouraging, 4
affinity and aversion, 16–18, 21– artistic methods, 9
23, 28–30 artistic streams, 31–32
age-appropriate instruction. See Asian languages, 21
under curriculum Asians, 21
agriculture, 149–50. See also land- assimilation, 77–81, 86–87
scape astonishment, 19
“Ah,” 68 astral body, 14, 15, 80, 107
Ahriman, 27, 33 breathing and, 25
alcohol, 180 development, 14
Alps, 146–47 educating, 15
amazement, 19 Atlantean period, 24
analogies, 16 Austria, 158, 173
animal instincts, 180 authority
animal kingdom, 95–99, 152, feeling for, 74
184 receptivity to, 9
natural history, 92, 95, 133 sense for, 9
anthroposophists, 37 awareness, 58
anthroposophy, 80, 169 awe, 20–21
Anthroposophy in Everyday Life
(Steiner), 30n B
anticipatory learning, 77 baby language, 113–14
archetypal forms, teaching, 10 beauty, 37
architecture, 35n Benedictines, 158–59
bias, 39 distribution of material, 111

blackness and black objects, 20 cuttlefish, 95–98
body, physical, 92–94
“bow-wow” theory of linguistics, D
20 death and dying, 31–33, 35–36,
breathing process, 24–26 42
Brentano, Franz, 122 “ding-dong” theory, 20
disharmony in life, cause of, 113
C Dornach, 37–38
childcare, 113–14 drawing, 3, 4, 10–11, 35–36, 51–
childhood development, 107–9 52, 62, 171, 172. See also
children, talking to young, 113– letters
14 geometry and, 133
Christ, 27n human beings, 92–94
college entrance examinations, as process of abstraction, 36
128 drilling, unnatural, 9
color, 34–35 duality, 31–32
comprehension, 76
comprehensive memory type, 87 E
consonants, 21, 22, 67, 68 e sound, 20, 21, 23, 69
joining them with vowels, 21– earth, evolutionary period of, 26
22 economics, 156
contradictions, teaching chil- education. See specific topics
dren, 113 egoism, 61, 186
copying, 11, 20 egotism, 181–83
cosmic feeling, 28 Egypt, ancient, 89
country schools, 90 development of writing in, 65,
creation, 46 71
criminal psychology, 137 electricity, 111, 115–16, 154
cultures, primitive, 68 emptiness and empty objects, 20
curriculum, 117, 134, 176. See esoteric knowledge, 84
also specific topics essay topics, 136
age-appropriate, 106, 110, 130, etheric body
132, 133, 142, 165–66, astral body uniting with, 107
169, 179, 183 cultivating, 14
for first year of school, 171– loosening between physical
72 body and, 11
Index 201
etheric will, 14 German language, 73, 119, 128,

Europe, Central 169
educational life, 83–84, 178 German literature, 71–72
eurythmy, 12, 32, 37–38, 56–57, gestures, 60
60, 171, 172 God, 60, 61, 160
eurythmy performances, 41–42 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang van,
expectation, state of, 55 34, 72n, 103, 104
experimental psychology. See psy- state of soul in 1790, 82
chology, experimental Goetheanum, 35, 38n
eye, functioning of human, 109, Gothic script, 167, 168
110 Graeco-Latin age, 89
Graeco-Roman culture, 89
F grammar and syntax, 55–56,
fairy tales, telling, 15, 169 120–29, 132, 133, 135,
fear, 20, 21 160–61, 169–70
finance, 186 gravity, 116–17
first school year, 171 Greek language, 89, 119, 176
focal points, inner, 16 Greeks, ancient, 89, 131
food, 180–81 gymnastics, 58, 171, 172
foreign language, 119–22, 126,
128, 132, 133, 135–36, H
139. See also specific lan- Hamlet (Shakespeare), 80
guages hands
forgetting, 87 awareness of, 51
freedom, 71 role in learning to read, 6
yearning for complete, 71 handwriting, 62, 70, 71
French language, 119, 127, 176 harmony
furniture, 37 of Apollonian and Dionysian
elements, 39
G of higher and lower beings, 1, 3
generation, respect for previous, of human nature, 43–44
48 musical, 40
geography, 133, 143–44, 149– of will, feeling, and thinking, 9
53, 156, 182, 183. See also head, 94, 99
landscape; mineralogy health, 180–82
geometry, 133, 140–42, 158, heart forces, 81, 84–85
159, 162, 174–75 Heine, Heinrich, 32
Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 28, L

76n ladies' colleges, 162
Herbartian school, 76 landscape, 144–47
history, 108, 110, 133, 149, 183 language(s), 22–23, 59. See also
human beings, natural history of, foreign language
95, 99–100 ancient, 89
human development, 100–102, structure, 58, 59
154 wisdom in, 59
human nature, 11, 12 Latin, 119, 127, 128, 167, 176
learning process, stages in, 77
I legends, telling, 15
i sound, 20–21, 69 letters, 3, 4, 6, 63–70, 167–68.
I-being, 61 See also consonants; vowels
breathing and, 25 life after death, teaching about,
development, 14 16, 42
educating, 14 life span, 26
idealism, 159, 161 light, 109, 110, 133
images, 18. See also sculpture and limbs, 93–95, 98–101
images linguistic study of meaning,
imagination, 66, 168–69, 179, 24
183, 186 Lucifer, 27n, 33
imitation, 11, 19, 45, 74
industry, 156–57 M
initiation, 11 manas, 80
initiative of teachers, 187 Marty, Anton, 122
instincts, 180, 185 materialism, 159, 186
intellectualism, 166 mathematics, 159
meaning, revelation and assimila-
J tion of, 78–81
Jewish culture, 60 melodies, 40, 42
judgment, power of, 185 memory, 135
memory experiments, 86–88
K memory training, 172
karma, 11, 29, 39 memory types, 86–87
Kisseleff, Tatjana, 38n Merchant of Venice, The (Shakes-
knowledge, used to develop peare), 40n
human capacities, 1 metamorphosis, 16, 98
Index 203
Metamorphosis of Plants, The numbers, teaching, 7

(Goethe), 82 nutrition, 180–82
Meumann, Ernst, 76n
mice, 96–97 O
Miklošic, Franz Xaver von, 122 o sound, 19, 23
“mind principle,” 80n obedience, 9
mineralogy, 133, 143, 147–48, Official Document, 177–78
152–53, 184–85 opinions, forming, 48–49
Molt, Emil, 156n
“mood of soul,” 83 P
moral concepts, instilling, 102 painting, 4, 9, 44, 52–53, 168,
morality of education, 178 171, 172
Morse telegraphy, 114–16 passive assimilation, 77
movements, 79–80 Pathfinders, 166
music, 3, 31–32, 44–45 Paul, Jean, 105
as basis of speech, 22 penmanship, 172–73
cultivating, 4–5 Phoenicians, 65, 71
as new creation, 45 physics, 109–12, 116–17, 133,
musical dilettantism, 41 182. See also specific topics
musical element, 39–40, 43, 44 pictorial art, 44
musical instruction, 9, 43, 104, pictures, 67
134, 171 planetary system, 26
musical performances, 40 planets, evolutionary periods of,
musical sense, 62 26
musically attuned ear, 12 plant world, 184–85
mysteries of life, 84 poetry, 31–32, 41–44, 135
as new creation, 45
N professions, 159
natural history instruction, 92, psychology, experimental, 75–78,
95, 102, 108, 110, 133, 86–88, 137
182, 183 Pythagorean theorem, 140–41,
natural history of human beings, 174–75
95, 99–100
new age, 89 R
nouns, 56, 169–70. See also gram- reading, 2, 54
mar and syntax role of limbs in, 6
Novalis, 72 and writing, 130–31
recapitulation, 77 soul activity, 78

recitation, 41–43, 135 soul development, 118
reflex action, cultivating, 139 soul forces, 154
reflexes, subconscious, 18 soul mood, 83
relativity, theory of, 117 soul process, inner, 21
religion, 106, 159–63, 172 speech, 168, 169
repetition, 52, 81, 85 as imitation, 19
retentive persons, 87 music as foundation of, 22
rhyming words, 44 as relationship between human
rhythm(s), 42, 132 and cosmos, 24
of life, 85, 86 as rooted in feeling, 19–22
role models, 49–50 as synthesis/union, 22
Romance languages, 23 types, 173
Romans, ancient, 89 spelling, 73–74, 173
spirits, 2
S spiritual science, 42, 71, 107
schedules, 134, 152 Steiner, Rudolf, 33n, 35n, 57,
Schiller, Johann Christoph 67n, 69n, 156n
Friedrich von, 41–43, An Outline of Esoteric Science,
103–5 24n, 26n
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 90–91 Discussions with Teachers, 92n,
Schröer, Karl Julius, 104–5 107n, 123n, 130n,
scientific methods, 88, 90 133n, 184n, 187n
sculpture and images, 31–33, 37, The Foundations of Human
39–41, 44 Experience, 17n, 117n,
self-awareness, 101 120, 178n, 179n, 185n
selflessness, 61 home town, 158n
sensory activity, 16 Rhythms of Learning, 30n
Shakespeare, William, 40n, 80 A Theory of Knowledge Based on
shapes, 37, 179. See also drawing; Goethe's World Concep-
form tion, 7n
singing, 44 story telling, 15, 169
Slavic languages, 122 students. See also specific topics
sleeping, alternation between teaching beyond their horizon,
waking and, 26 48–49
social life, 58 subconscious, 18, 113, 154
socialism, 37, 58, 177–78 substitution, 11
Index 205
subtraction, 8 W
supraphysical, 3 Wachsmuth, Guenther, 57n
symphonies, 42 Waldorf curriculum, 165–66. See
syntax. See grammar and syntax also curriculum
Waldorf school, 75, 88, 118, 165,
T 166, 188, 189. See also spe-
teachers cific topics
authority, 49 whole to parts, teaching/proceed-
characteristics, 187–88 ing from, 7, 67
cooperation and coordination will, 28, 29, 31, 59, 91n, 171,
between, 54 188
perspective on life, 84 downward flow of physical and
teaching. See also specific topics etheric, 14
goals, 1, 118 educating the, 79
engaging the whole human formation and development,
being, 5 51, 55, 81
nature of, 45 harmony and, 9
telegrams, 114 music and, 39, 46
temperaments, 30n will element, awakening the, 93
textbook quality, 158 women's colleges, 162
Theory of Color (Goethe), 34 writing, 2, 62–67, 136. See also
theosophical movement, 80 letters
“threefold social order,” 57n good vs. bad, 172–73
town schools, 90 history, 65–66
tribal people, 68 taught by using art and draw-
trivialities of life, 111 ing forms, 4
U Y
u sound, 20, 21 youth organizations, 166
unconscious, 18, 113, 154
unity, 33–34
ideal of, 159
urban schools, 90
V
verbs, 56
vowels, 19–23, 69
During the last two decades of the nineteenth century,
the Austrian-born Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) became a
respected and well-published scientific, literary, and philo-
sophical scholar, particularly known for his work on
Goethe’s scientific writings. After the turn of the century
he began to develop his earlier philosophical principles
into an approach to methodical research of psychological
and spiritual phenomena.
His multifaceted genius has led to innovative and
holistic approaches in medicine, philosophy, religion,
education (Waldorf schools), special education, science,
economics, agriculture (Biodynamic method), architec-
ture, drama, the new arts of speech and eurythmy, and
other fields of activity. In 1924 he founded the General
Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches
throughout the world.

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PRACTICAL ADVICE TO TEACHERS

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Foreword by Astrid Schmitt-Stegmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Lecture 1. August 21, 1919

Before the opening of the first Waldorf school, Rudolf

her developmental stages, but also how teachers in their method

motivational will forces and harmonizing the child’s whole

element of form through different rhythmic activities with the

The second stage to which Rudolf Steiner points is the

limbs—as seen in relation to the animal world, is the basis for

revealed through historical development and biographies, the

also become acquainted with banking and bookkeeping, and

Human beings of initiative

When you teach children reading and writing today, simply

less physical; and in music or drawing, or in related fields, we

When you begin by appealing to children’s nature this way, you

quickly become accustomed to handling a musical instrument;

were to base our teaching only on the process of drawing evolv-

Afterward we may reverse the procedure. We can fragment

1. Refer to A Theory of Knowledge Based on Goethe’s World Conception by Rudolf

is appropriate to human nature—first the sum is considered,

course, be ignored, though a rather disproportionate amount of

back to those earlier cultural ages that had a different disposition

You may recall a lecture in which I tried to awaken a feeling

2. Acanthus (bear’s breech) is a perennial herb or shrub native to the Mediterra-

encounter something artificial, they might say it looks natural

being into the upper, or sensory, human. Through music,

body develop gradually and that, owing to heredity, the etheric

Educators must keep this truth very clearly in mind. They

Now we will develop more fully what we only outlined yester-

1. See lecture 2, The Foundations of Human Experience (previously Study of Man).

there; thus, in the middle system, the chest region, there is

thoughts. We understand the speech phenomenon only when

“bow-wow” theory of linguistics asserted that all speech is imi-

awe. It is found with particular frequency in Asian languages

human communities as well. In German, Kopf (“head”)

This linguistic study of meaning is extraordinarily helpful in

beginning with the number of breaths in four minutes—sev-

How is our life ingrained in the universe? Our average life

think of yourself as a cosmic process—that is the reality—and

If you cannot manage to see every human being as a cosmic

6. Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), German philosopher and educator.

we must watch everything in an especially loving way, so that it

7. They discussed ways of dealing with children in terms of their temperaments;

Yesterday I pointed out that our teaching should begin with a

1. Steiner is referring to lecture 1 in this course.

opposites, but there is also a real capacity for synthesis to higher

mortality only by feeling in ourselves the urge to enliven what

people to say that because the head is a unity, as is the rest of

We should introduce children to color as early as possible,

5. See Steiner’s lectures in Colour.

If we simply take a pencil and draw a horizon, it is an

In this way you gradually come to appreciate that the forms

7. Tatjana Kisseleff (1881–1970), eurythmy teacher at the Goetheanum from

had learned to some of their teachers and anthroposophists

be done with the necessary tact, since we must not distance

definitely wrong. Even the most unmusical children must at

8. The Merchant of Venice, act 5, scene 1; in full:

such a major role in music. It cannot be denied that musical

from the depths of the soul.9 With many of his poems an